


Infinitely Precious [Kinkterror 2019 ficlets]

by tei



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M, Other warnings and tags in chapter summaries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-11-15 03:30:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 31
Words: 48,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20859515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tei/pseuds/tei
Summary: Ficlets for thekinkterror fest!





	1. Blood Drive

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Blood/gore

“I can’t believe you didn’t _know_,” says Will. “it’s not like I was keeping it from you. It just didn’t seem very important.”

Hannibal just _looks_ at Will, with that creepy stillness that means he’s as close as he ever gets these days to wringing Will’s neck where he stands. 

“You know everything else about me,” Will tries. “Come on, you— I had no reason to think you _hadn’t_ read my email. And my phone records, and my calendar.”

More silence. 

“I don’t understand why this even matters to you,” Will continues. “You don’t object to people’s lives being saved in _theory,_ do you? Or did you take some sort of... anti-Hippocratic oath?”

Hannibal glances down at the computer screen again, eyes narrowed like the words might change if he glares at them terrifyingly enough. Will can only assume that the subject line _Book your next donation appointment with the Red Cross today!_ remains obstinately in place. 

“Jesus,” says Will. “Just— say something, will you? Come on, I’ve been going every two months for— I don’t know, decades. Since before I was a cop. I’m O-negative, they always practically beg me to book my next appointment.”

That was either the wrong or the right thing to say, because Hannibal finally pushes himself away from the new computer, which Will had inaugurated by indulging in his curiosity and signing into the email account he hadn’t checked since before their disappearance. Hannibal looks furious, and Will has to remind himself that he hasn’t actually done anything _wrong_ as Hannibal towers over him. 

Hannibal, of course, has always had his own criteria for _wrong._

He lifts a hand up slowly, cupping Will’s cheek and jaw, and Will shivers. He’s reminded viscerally of how Hannibal had looked before stabbing him, every damn time Hannibal touches his face— which Hannibal is clearly aware of, and uses to his advantage. 

Hannibal leans in, his lips brushing the stray hairs near Will’s ear as he whispers, “How many people, Will?”

Will’s heart sinks, because he isn’t stupid. He knows what this is about. Probably knew from the beginning, if he’s being honest with himself. 

He swallows, and pulls on the tiny thread of defiance he can feel curling in his belly, pushing up like a weed that won’t stop growing through the cracks in the sidewalk. God knows Hannibal’s stomped on it enough times, but then, he only does it because he enjoys watching it grow back. At least Will knows _that_ for sure.

Will takes a deep breath and leans in, pressing his forehead against Hannibal’s shoulder and tilting his head slightly to bare his neck as much as possible. “Been giving blood for… let’s say the last twenty years or so,” he says. “Six times a year. Probably missed a few appointments from the stab wound, and then the encephalitis, and then the other stab wound, and then the stab wounds after that, so we’ll knock off a few. Maybe a hundred and ten appointments, in all. About a pint each time. The average patient requires 4.6 units of blood—” Will fuzzily tries to recall the feel-good statistics from the brochures in the waiting rooms— “so, let’s say at least twenty-five people walking around with my blood in them.”

Will doesn’t bother pointing out that it’s not that simple, that there are plenty of ways donated blood can be processed, that a sickle cell patient might have a transfusion every few weeks and thus Will’s blood would have passed through them only briefly, while a patient requiring only a small amount of blood might mean that the total number of people carrying around bits of Will Graham inside them is actually much higher. 

Hannibal knows all that, of course, and he also doesn’t care. Wil finds himself walked slowly backwards and crushed against the wall, Hannibal holding him in place while he grabs at Will’s wrist and holds it up to his face. _Smelling_ him. Smelling his _blood._ Typical. 

Will was caught off guard at first, but now he’s in on the game, and he intends to enjoy it. “It just kills you, doesn’t it,” he murmurs. “All those people. Normal people. Going about their business, all while they have me _inside_ them. Bits and pieces of me, packaged and sent out to hospitals all over the country.”

Hannibal sets his teeth against Will’s skin, and Will tenses. He would let him do it, of course, but the prospect of blunt teeth punching through the delicate skin of his arm isn’t exactly pleasant. He’s relieved when Hannibal just nips and tongues at him. 

Will is practically delerious with pleasure— who knew having your _arm_ licked could be so erotic— by the time he hears Hannibal’s muttered, “That’s not what offends me about it.”

Hannibal does’t offer any explanation, and Will is too busy trying to shove Hannibal’s pants down his legs to ask for one. It’ll come up again, he figures. It’s not like blood is ever far away from their thoughts. 

***

Will is settling into an armchair after dinner when Hannibal approaches him with a medical bag. 

Hannibal takes the phrasebook Will had been planning on studying and places it on the coffee table. Will watches with interest as he ties a piece of elastic around Will’s bicep. Hannibal doesn’t look him in the eyes— not avoiding contact, just focused on the work of screwing a needle into a fresh syringe and rubbing an alcohol wipe over the site of the most prominent vein. 

Will’s eyes wander over to the bag, wondering what Hannibal’s giving him. There’s about an equal chance that it’ll be healing or hellish, with the most likely option being that he simply thinks Will is too tense and wants to sedate him. He doesn’t mind the idea; Hannibal would let Will do it to him too, probably. He’ll stare at Will’s soft slack-jawed sleepy body like it’s the most wonderful, desirable thing in the world, and then lay him out on the bed and bite and lick and fuck to his heart’s content while Will just accepts, completely incapable of any sort of reciprocity. The idea that Hannibal _likes_ him like that, completely useless, is both logical and completely terrifying. He settles down a little in the armchair, getting comfortable. 

But Hannibal doesn’t pull a vial out of the bag. Instead he just plunges the needle right into Will’s vein and starts drawing _out_ blood instead. 

Will sits up a little straighter. He has to push down some fucked-up disappointment that he’s not going to be drugged; but then, he can always ask for it later. This is different. 

“Do you like it here?” Hannibal asks, his eyes fixed on the dark red slowly filling the plastic tube. 

Will hums. “Well enough for how long?” he asks. He _does_ like it, at least better than plenty of the other places they’ve ended up in recently. It’s secluded, with a small lake and a patch of forest obscuring their house. It’s as if Hannibal were trying to re-create Will’s Wolf Trap house, as closely as he can. 

“A couple months,” says Hannibal. The syringe is full, and he pulls it out of Will’s arm and replaces it with a cotton pad. “I still wish to go to Europe with you.”

“But fleeing to the Continent is your usual pattern,” Will acknowledges. “We should lay low for a while first. Yes, I like it here.” 

Hannibal carefully tapes the cotton over the puncture mark. “Good,” he says. “Then a toast is in order.” With that, he disappears into the kitchen. 

“You don’t usually do cocktails,” Will grins when Hannibal returns— at some length— with two glasses. 

Hannibal shrugs in acknowledgement. “I don’t usually have such fine ingredients.” 

Will sniffs his glass. It smells earthy, but also somehow sweet; the only components he’s certain of— besides the featured ingredient— are orange juice and Scotch. 

He holds it up to the light. It’s well-mixed, although it would probably separate given a little time. He imagines Hannibal in the kitchen, taking Will’s blood, dividing it into glasses, adding sweetness and flavour and alcohol, then— no. Will’s mind rewinds. He’s missed a step. The one where Hannibal rolled up his own sleeve, drew his own vial of blood. He’s certain, and sure enough, there’s a small bulge of cotton on the inside of Hannibal’s left elbow. 

“Are we exchanging?” he asks. “Or mixed together?”

Hannibal just smiles and holds up his own glass in a toast. “To a new home,” he says. 

Will is fairly sure it’s the latter. Hannibal wouldn’t pass up on a chance to have their essences mingled, cojoined beyond even a hope of pulling them apart. He raises the glass to his lips and sips. 

It’s not bad. He would have drank it all even if it were revolting, but he also has more faith in Hannibal than that. The distinct coppery tang of the blood is more a sense memory than anything else; it clouds his mind with the feeling of being _close_ to Hannibal. At all of the turning points in their shared lives, Will’s senses had been flooded with the taste and smell of blood. He shivers, and takes another sip.

“A juiced blood orange,” Hannibal lists, “Cherry liqueur, creme de cacao, Amaro Averna, cold coffee, scotch. You, me.” 

“It’s delicious,” says Will, and wonders how many times he’s said that to Hannibal, and how many times it’s been the physical essence of a human being that Will is complimenting him on. He imagines, for a moment, the two of them as a flowchart: human life and energy flowing only one way, out from the world and into Will and Hannibal. There’s only a thin trickle in the other direction: the twenty-five (roughly) people whose bodies are sustained by cells made by Will. 

He raises his glass in a mock toast. “Does this make up for it, then?” he asks. “All the others who have this?”

“If it were possible to identify them, I would drain each one of them dry,” says Hannibal easily. “Strung up, with the heart still pumping to hasten the blood flow. Something quite artistically satisfactory could be arranged with a good supply of dessicated corpses, and it would be discovered quite easily outside the local Red Cross.”

Will just rolls his eyes. He feels loose and indulgent from the alcohol. “Drama queen,” he comments. 

Hannibal doesn’t dignify that with an answer, or possibly he just knows he has no defense. “Their simple possession of your blood is not my objection,” he says.

Will watches the reddish-brown liquid swirl in the glass. Hannibal isn’t much for cocktails, but this one, Will has to admit, is exquisite. 

“Your objection is that they didn’t appreciate it,” Will says. It sounds hubristic when _he_ says it, of course, but he knows it to be true for Hannibal. “All they did with it was use it to sustain their gross, unimportant, leaky, fragile human bodies. They couldn’t appreciate the _aesthetic_ of it. They didn’t even want it in the first place— presumably they would have preferred to be able to keep the blood that God gave them in the first place.” Will takes a sip. “Am I right?” 

Hannibal just sips his own drink, eyes dark. “Such disregard for beauty is inconsiderate indeed.” 

Will nearly laughs, but he doesn’t want to ruin the moment. Because, well. As ridiculous as Hannibal is, it is rather sweet.

Instead Will locks eyes with him, deliberately drinking the rest of the cocktail in one gulp, like it’s cheap beer and not expensive liqueurs mixed with human blood. He watches Hannibal wince at that, and grins as he saunters over to lean over Hannibal in his armchair. 

He kisses him, letting Hannibal taste the residue of the drink on his lips. “You’re the only one who knows how to treat me right?” He teases. “Really, that’s your pitch?” 

“Unsubtle, I know,” says Hannibal, and he closes his eyes and savours as he downs the rest of his own drink. “But accurate. You are infinitely precious, Will.” 

Will leans back in for another kiss, and wonders if innocent people will die as a result of the bank losing a regular donor of a rare blood type. If perhaps his contributing to a blood shortage is just another church roof thrown down by God: inevitable, maybe even helpful. 

It’s worth it, he decides, and offers himself to be devoured.


	2. Anniversary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Torture
> 
> Inspired by [this conversation on twitter about Hannibal and junk food](https://twitter.com/murakistags/status/1177460909423218689); then a friend showed me [Gourmet Makes](https://video.bonappetit.com/series/gourmet-makes), and I couldn't resist.

**Then**

The parking lot is entirely dark and empty, and the lights of the gas station shine with a yellow glow that, in Will’s exhausted state, seem welcoming. 

They’re not welcoming, and he knows that. Gas stations have TVs, and internet connections, and people. There’s no way of knowing how far the news of their escape-or-possibly-death has travelled, and every time they stop there’s the possibility of finding out the hard way. Still, he’s been driving for nearly 24 hours, and Will is _hungry_. Hungry in that anxious, tired, nasty way that reminds him all too much of roadtrips with his dad as a kid, speeding to their next temporary home and wondering if he’ll be allowed a chocolate bar or a bag of Cheetos at the next rest stop they pass. 

Hannibal is dozing in the passenger seat. He’s been spending most of his time sleeping, which Will can only assume is a good thing for the bullet wound in his stomach. He’d followed Hannibal’s delirious instructions for cleaning and bandaging it, and half-expected him to be dead by the first morning. But if Hannibal is one thing, the man is _lucky_, and he hasn’t been running a fever so far. 

Hannibal stirs as Will pulls into a parking spot a little bit away from the building and clicks off the headlights. For a moment he just sits, closing his eyes after hours of staring at the road, leaning forward against the steering wheel to stretch out his back with a groan. 

Inside the gas station, there’s— food. Hot drinks. Will’s mouth waters as he pictures the flavoured coffees from the dirty machines, the ones you press a button to dispense and that taste thick with sweeteners and preservatives. He hasn’t eaten anything like that in _ages_; his and Molly’s cooking was usually simple vegetarian dishes, and it would never have occurred to either of them to buy junk food. And before that there had been _Hannibal_, and the thought of Hannibal is usually so invasive, so all-encompassing, that the concept of eating food that would probably cause Hannibal to murder someone had never even crossed Will’s mind. 

It’s crossing it now, though. It’s three in the morning, they’ve eaten everything they were able to throw in the car from the cliff house, and Will is beginning to suspect that the new Will Graham that was rebirthed from the Atlantic Ocean is someone who will have no problem at all eating a Mars Bar in front of Hannibal Lecter. 

That doesn’t solve _Hannibal,_ though. 

Will watches as Hannibal tries to yawn, then catches himself with a wince and an aborted flutter of his hand to his stomach. He breathes carefully, slowly through the pain, then looks over at Will. “Hungry?” he asks. 

“You read my mind,” mutters Will, and warily angles the rear-view mirror to catch a glimpse of his own face. 

It isn’t good. The stitches holding his cheek closed aren’t Hannibal’s best work; they zigzag crazily across the wound from the way his hands had been shaking. Will, perversely, loves it; has been worrying his tongue into his cheek to feel the stitches all day. They’re a reminder of how _human_ Hannibal had looked, how fragile, his eyes frightened as he tried to disguise his own pain while patching up Will. 

The gas station attendant probably won’t see it that way, though. Will winces and glances over at Hannibal. He looks tired and pale, but the evidence of his injuries is hidden under a loose-fitting shirt. The stubble on his face is a drastic enough change from his usual look that it’s possible he won’t be recognized. 

Will licks his lips. “So, are you desperate enough to actually eat anything in there?” 

Hannibal is already digging around in the bag for some cash, and he looks up in surprise. “Of course I will eat. Did you expect me to refuse?”

Will frowns. “Gas station food? I mean, I— I didn’t know what to expect. Figured a Twinkie would be equivalent to some sort of torture for you.” 

For a moment Hannibal just blinks at him, and Will realizes he’s genuinely confused. It’s actually slightly enjoyable, until Will realizes he should probably be embarrassed. “Okay,” he admits, “That was… probably a stupid thing to think.” 

Hannibal folds the bills and carefully puts them in his pocket, trying to remain as upright as possible as he does so. Then he says quietly, “I also knew hunger as a child, Will.” 

The car is quiet. Will swallows, and blinks back tears that he’s sure are mostly from sleep deprivation. It’s easy to think of Hannibal as an entity that only happens to other people. But not even Hannibal is an island. Things happen _to_ him, too. 

Hannibal reaches around to touch a gentle fingertip to Will’s cheek, just above the uppermost stitch, and Will turns to look at him. He’s smiling, the tiny quirk that Will loves because he’s certain the only one who can even see it. “What would you like?” Hannibal asks. 

“Something hot and disgustingly sweet to drink,” Will says. “And a kit-kat. And something that might be bread but isn’t quite. And some kind of meat pressed into an unrecognizable shape.” 

Hannibal nods, and his fingers brush through Will’s hair gently. Will shivers. “Certainly.” 

***

**Now**

“Woah.”

The kitchen is a disaster zone. Hannibal is nearly always neat and organized while he cooks, but now there are ingredients strewn across the countertops, and he looks positively frazzled. Will glances around, and can’t figure out how any of the things on the counter— blocks of chocolate, cream, trimmings of meat, at least five different kinds of flour, and numerous jars and bottles that Will can’t even begin to identify— might fit together into a coherent dish. 

They don’t, apparently. Hannibal opens the oven to check something, looks vaguely annoyed, and goes back to stirring a pot on the stove with a quick nip over to glance into the refrigerator. “This is more finicky than I expected,” he mutters, apparently at nobody in particular. 

“Uh,” says Will, “What is it?”

“It’s an anniversary,” says Hannibal easily. 

Will blinks, and tries to count back. This is the first time that Hannibal has used the word _anniversary,_ but Will can’t think of anything particularly significant that happened on this exact day a year ago, except in the sense that everything since Hannbal’s escape has been significant. But it was a year and two days ago that they had killed Dolarhyde together, and Will had assumed that the venture capitalist currently in pieces in the chest freezer in the basement had been their anniversary celebration for _that._ And the day that they had finally crashed into each other sexually wasn’t due for an anniversary celebration for another few weeks, though Will was certainly looking forward to commemorating it. 

Two days after Dolarhyde’s death, though, they had been… on the road, with Will blearily navigating them through middle America and Hannibal nipping into gas stations for more rations every few days before falling right back asleep in the passenger seat. 

And then Will recognizes the smell wafting out of the oven, and he _giggles._ He can’t help himself. Hannibal’s mouth twists. 

“You’re commemorating the one-year anniversary of our first time eating junk food together?” Will says. Hannibal pulls the tray from the oven, and the ingredients strewn around the kitchen start to resolve themselves into coherency. “Of course you are,” Will continues. “You liked it, didn’t you?” 

Hannibal just smiles, sticking a toothpick into something that looks and smells very much like a Twinkie. Will leans in close and enjoys the aroma. “You don’t necessarily need your food to be _gourmet,_" Will says, closing his eyes and analyzing the kitchen like a crime scene, purely because knows Hannibal loves nothing better than to be analyzed and understood by Will. “You need your food to be aesthetically appropriate. Just like your kills. And when you’re on the run from the FBI, eating junk food in the back seat of the car as you re-bandage your bullet wound is aesthetically appropriate.” 

“Something hot and disgustingly sweet to drink,” says Hannibal, quoting Will’s own order back to him and pointing at the saucepan on the stove. It seems to contain some combination of coffee, hideously expensive chocolate syrup, and an array of thickeners and flavourings in little bottles beside the burner. Then he points to the refrigerator, beside which are resting a pair of tongs that look like they could be used to press a design into a wafer cookie, some molds, and the remains of several attempts at chocolate. “Kit-kat,” he says. He gestures towards the pan of Twinkies. “Something that looks like bread but isn’t quite,” he says, and finally, picks up cured meat pressed into a long, thin pepperoni stick. “And some kind of meat pressed into an unrecognizable shape.”

Will’s face is splitting into a grin completely without his conscious control. “Emphasis on the _some kind_ of meat, I assume,” he says, and Hannibal dips his head a little in acknowledgement. “I have taken some artistic licenses in recreating our meal,” he admits. 

Will swoops in to kiss him, and it’s only then that he notices the rather significant pile of wrappers in the garbage. 

“So… how much junk food did you have to eat in order to get all this right?” he asks. 

Hannibal squirms. “Quite a bit,” he admits.

“The sacrifices you make for me,” Will says, and he’s mostly joking. 

“Have all been worth it,” replies Hannibal, and he is, Will knows, entirely serious. 

“C’mon.” Will snags the tray of cooling gourmet kit-kat bars from the refrigerator. “We have to eat these in the backseat of the car and then snog each other silly. I don’t make the rules, it’s our _anniversary._”


	3. Cannibals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bedelia, after the last supper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Dr. Hannibal Lecter professed to know nothing about these matters. The president and the conductor of the Philharmonic testified that they could not recall the fare at Dr. Lecter’s dinner, though Lecter was known for the excellence of his table and had contributed numerous articles to gourmet magazines._  
_The president of the Philharmonic subsequently was treated for anorexia and problems related to alcohol dependency at a holistic nerve sanitarium in Basel._ -The Silence of the Lambs
> 
> Also inspired by Gillian Anderson being extremely extra and using the final scene of Hannibal to [film an ad for PETA.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYdZPwJfvxI) (At least, I think it's an ad for PETA. Technically all she says is that meat is a matter of choice, so it could also be an ad for cannibalism. (Also, obligatory: Fuck PETA.))
> 
> **CN: eating disorders. This is not an uplifting recovery story. This is a descent into madness that escapes being MCD only on the narrow technical point that the MCD probably only takes place after the ending.**

The man’s hand is on her knee under the table, and Bedelia feels like retching. 

She stares at her plate. It’s fettuccine Alfredo: pasta, butter, Parmesan. There aren’t many foods that feel safe, any more, but this dish is simple enough not to have featured in her nightmares recently. 

Safe enough, anyway. Perhaps some would argue that any long noodle is a risky endeavour on a first date because of the risk of splashing sauce down one’s front, but buttery sauce ending up on her chest has been pushed way down to the bottom of the list of Bedelia’s worries, these days. 

That worry is still _there_, of course. Getting sauce on herself would be mortifying. It’s just impossible to separate the flutter of first-date nerves from the gnawing ache of, well, any other kind of neurosis. And there seem to be a lot to choose from. 

Currently, every brain cell that she had hoped to make available for intelligent conversation with the man across the table is focused on his hand. It’s his left hand, his right being still engaged in operating a wine glass, and it’s gentle and warm and uninvasive. It has perched just above her kneecap. Bedelia is wearing a nice pair of slacks, which is all she’s worn since— since. The idea of her wearing a skirt, of someone _seeing_ what’s under it, fills her with simultaneous dread and excitement so intense that she can’t even begin to unpack it. 

She doesn’t mind the man’s hand, or at least doesn’t _want_ to mind it. He’s kind and intelligent and handsome— if being a psychiatrist is good for nothing else, it’s at least helpful in picking out high-quality specimens on dating sites. She’d wanted his hand there, even. A longing for escalation of physical contact is a good thing, at the end of a date, and Bedelia feels an echo of that feeling, like it’s something from another lifetime that she can’t quite place. 

But the hand is on her knee, just above the joint where flesh and metal join, and Bedelia can’t breathe. 

The man from the dating site isn’t pushy, and he has normal levels of empathy, neither debilitatingly high nor sociopathically low. He can see her seizing up at the contact, and he pulls his hand away without comment, adjusting course easily. He’s a good person, she recognizes distantly, and she wishes it made her like him more and not less. 

_Put it back,_ she wants to say. _Please touch me. Ask what happened. Please make me tell you. I want you to know. Please pity me. Please._

She wouldn’t tell him, if he asked. She hasn’t told anybody. She especially wouldn’t tell him if he tried to _make_ her, which he wouldn’t do anyway. The thought still bangs around in her head, though, and she sucks in a few bits of long, stringy pasta to avoid having to say anything. They feel cloying in her mouth, and she stops chewing and looks down at the half-finished plate. 

She pushes it away, and he glances down at the remaining pile of food. “Not a fan?” he asks. 

“I’m… not hungry,” she says carefully, trying to give him the kind of smile that will reassure him it wasn’t his behaviour that put her off. 

“Oh,” he says, “no problem. Not feeling well? Or just need something else? My mom used to say dinner and dessert go into two different stomachs, when I tried to convince her I was only hungry for dessert.” He smiles, and Bedelia has to admit to herself that the thought of sharing a plate of tiramisu with him is appealing. 

And then there’s a flash of concern in his eyes when she just shakes her head. Even though he barely knows her, even though he’ll probably never think about her again after tonight, when they both go home and she fails to pick up the phone to call him again. But for just a tiny moment someone seems _worried_ about Bedelia Du Maurier, and that is better that any dessert. 

***

“The problem with being intimately acquainted with the workings of the mind,” says Bedelia, “Is that one can never be truly alone in one’s own head again.”

She _is_ alone, though, at least by the conventional physical standard of there being no one else in her house. A part of her wonders if perhaps, if she talks to herself enough, the inner voice she keeps expecting to talk back will sound like one of them. She isn’t sure who she would rather it be, and most of the time is glad it hasn’t happened yet. 

She justifies talking to herself with the reasoning that it’s like a test: as long as she doesn’t hear Will Graham or Hannibal Lecter talking back to her, she’s still OK. 

She wonders if Hannibal ever stood like this: in front of the refrigerator, peering in at the contents like he doesn’t already know exactly what’s in there. Probably not. She wonders how much Hannibal thinks about food. Does it occupy his every thought? She had assumed for a while that it must; how could someone organize their life around the conversion of inanimate flesh into fuel for living flesh without some level of obsession? 

But she’s certain that, if Hannibal does think about food more than the average person, it’s different from Bedelia. Because Hannibal Lecter is happy, and that fact comprehensively rules out the idea that his thought processes around food are anything similar to… _this._

Bedelia’s stomach turns and her mouth waters as she imagines sitting down to a feast, a proper _meal_, with the relish that Hannibal does. In her mind, she is free. She eats anything and everything. She’s not certain if the meat in her mind is human flesh, and she doesn’t care. She can spend hours imagining eating. 

Eating in reality is a different story. Some foods are still safe. Vegetables, provided they don’t touch one another. Vegan protein bars that taste like chalk dust. Bread, if eaten for lunch, and in the absence of any other grain-based foods for lunch or dinner. 

“You’re not fooling yourself,” Bedelia says quietly. She tucks herself into her chair, the same one she used to sit in to talk to Will and Hannibal, but she’s curled up with her toes underneath her instead of the relaxed posture she affected for sessions with other people. Her toes and fingers are freezing. She knows why, and chooses to ignore it. “And doesn’t it just make it all the more painful, to be able to see exactly where this is going, and barrel ahead anyway?” 

Most of the time she’s still glad that she doesn’t hallucinate them, but there are exceptions. Right now she almost wishes that she could call up an image of Will, sitting across from her like he did just a few days before eating pieces of her. Maybe it would be easier if she were his kind of crazy, the kind that can talk to people who aren’t there and believe it so intensely that the world seemed to warp around his visions. 

But she isn’t Will’s kind of crazy, which is the entire problem. “You’re jealous of him,” she whispers to herself, hating both the part of her that says it and the part of her that resents being told the truth. “Will Graham was always broken, and everyone always saw it. And you never had that, did you? Nobody ever looked at you and saw something needy and helpless and unstable. Not even Hannibal. So you’ll show them. You’ll show them what they did to you with your ribs poking from your body and your hair falling out in clumps and your blue fingers and your yellowed teeth. So that people will shake their heads sadly when they look at you. Pity you. Know how fragile and broken you are.” 

Now, it’s Hannibal she wishes she could conjure up a hallucination of. At least if it were _him_ saying this to her, she could feel properly angry. 

She doesn’t. She’s stuck in glass, not hallucinating, not eating, not living, not yet dying. 

***

A letter arrives from Hannibal. 

Bedelia isn’t exactly surprised. Hannibal always did love his fucking letters. She’d watched him writing them in Italy, his even, looping cursive looking like something out of another century. Some were polite, thoughtful missives to people who didn’t know he’d harmed them. Some were to people who _did_ know he’d harmed them, and they were no less kind and polite than the others. The complete lack of malice was the entire point, Bedelia knew: his honesty and kindness and genuine affection made the knowledge that his goodwill would have no impact on his actions all the more terrifying. 

Many of the letters, of course, had been to Will. They’d ended up crumpled up and thrown into the fireplace without her having ever had the chance to sneak a glance at one. Hannibal probably could have found a way to send something to Will in the middle of the fucking ocean if he’d wanted to, but as far as she could tell, he’d never quite settled on anything to say to him. 

She opens it, because she knows she’s going to eventually and she might as well get it over with. It’s more of a postcard than a letter, actually; on the inside of the envelope is a piece of expensive cardstock, and the side facing the envelope’s flap contains a pencil drawing of what looks to be the backyard of a country home. There’s the wooden railing of a verandah, and beyond that a garden hemmed in on two sides by trees. In the distance, a small stream winds its way through the landscape. 

Bedelia has no doubt whatsoever that Hannibal had sketched this from exactly what he saw in front of him. He’d basically sent her a picture of whatever slice of secluded paradise he and Will had escaped to, and he’s entirely certain that she isn’t going to show it to anyone. 

Bedelia wishes she were the kind of person who would phone up the FBI and offer this as evidence. Maybe once— before Neal Frank swallowing his tongue on her office floor, before Hannibal, before everything— she was that kind of person. But now her head is fuzzy, and her heart races and skips crazily every time she changes positions, and the edema in her legs makes it painful to even stand, though she forces herself to do so anyway for most of the day. The idea of talking to Jack Crawford is beyond her capacity. And now that she has his letter in her hands, the idea of not doing exactly what Hannibal Lecter wants her to is equally beyond her capacity.

She flips the postcard over. 

_Bedelia, _

_I had hoped that, by the point that it was timely for me to write you a letter of thanks for our excellent meal together, you would have found a more effective method of self-defense than an oyster fork. _

_I cannot say I am surprised that you now find yourself in the position of requiring defense mainly from yourself. All of us are our own primary antagonists on Earth. You know intimately that I am no exception, so I hope my advice on the subject can carry the weight of both our long mutual companionship, and a certain amount of authority. _

_It is, admittedly, aesthetically appropriate that you attempt to move past the horrors of your past by rejecting the vessel in which they came packaged. To renounce entirely the connection between food consumption and the spiritual self that is nourished by one’s meals would indeed be a victory over me. _

_In the absence of that particular victory— which you know, Bedelia, you cannot achieve— I suggest that your decision to sink into this frankly uninteresting and self-absorbed form of neurosis, anorexia, achieves nothing at all. It cannot touch me. _

_I have enclosed a list of inpatient treatment centres, appropriately far removed from Baltimore to protect your privacy and reputation. You could, of course, have put this list together yourself, but you did not. If there are further steps in this process that you cannot bring yourself to take, I can of course arrange for them to be taken for you. _

_Hannibal Lecter_

***

She chooses Vermont. 

She had considered, for about three terrifying hours, saying an enormous fuck you to Hannibal and his _discretion_, his consideration for her _career_, and simply checking herself into Johns Hopkins, where half the staff know her, Hannibal, or the both of them, from their residencies. She doesn’t. Hannibal had known she wouldn’t; you can’t make grand gestures fuelled solely by raw vegetables and vegan protein bars. She puts the question of how Hannibal knew _anything_ about her entirely out of her mind. 

It’s a private, expensive clinic, and Bedelia waits with her breath catching in her throat as they process her fee. She half-expects them to come back and say that it’s already been settled anonymously, but they don’t. A small kindness from Hannibal: one tiny piece of dignity and freedom, to be allowed to pay her own bill. 

There is another envelope waiting for her in her room when she checks in. It contains no note, merely a stunningly detailed drawing of the view from their window in Florence. Bedelia no longer even bothers wishing for the strength to throw it out; she is here, after all, and therefore she still belongs to Hannibal completely. She might as well have something to decorate the bare white room with. There is no way to win this game with him. 

The social system of the clinic, though— _that_, Bedelia discovers to her surprise, is a game she _can_ win. She was entirely right about the demographic likely to show up at a pricey, upscale place like this: young daughters of rich parents, transposing the pressures of adolescence in the upper class into a slavish devotion to the kind of darkly beautiful fragility that very specifically excludes the possibility of growing _older._ She had expected to be scorned and feared, and possibly she is. 

But she is also a psychiatrist, and— it turns out— just as capable as Hannibal is of turning her professional insight to her own advantage, given the right situation. If anorexia is one thing, it’s a competitive disease. It’s not the only pathology of her experience where patients compete for the prize of being the sickest and wear hospital admissions and near-death experiences like badges of honour, but it’s the most extreme. 

Bedelia can recognize that, and see the utter absurdity of it, and still want to _participate._

So when a girl turns to her over (strictly supervised, heart-pounding, nauseating) lunch one day and says “Is this your first time here?” and a dozen other gaunt curious faces turn towards her, Bedelia affects a listless smile and says, “_Here_, yeah,” with all of the worldly experience she can imply with two little words, and she feels a warm glow inside her when she knows she has them. 

The main activities among inmates are figuring out ways to secretly eat less, and figuring out ways to secretly move more. It is not difficult, with the benefit of an entire career probing into some truly fucked-up minds, to come up with plenty of ways to achieve both, and have every girl in the ward convinced that Bedelia is the sage voice of experience. 

She’s good at it, and it feels good to be good at something again. Bits of food end up pressed into the space inside shoes, where they squish around for the mandatory hour after meals when the bathrooms are locked, until they can be disposed of. Bedelia organizes a clandestine swap that leaves nearly everyone on the ward with too-big shoes, plenty of room for contraband. She teaches isometric exercises that can make you sweat from exertion all while looking like you’re not doing anything at all, and enjoys the girls’ wide, trusting eyes as she names each muscle. She recites half-remembered statistics about the effects of shivering on base calorie burning, and they all crank their shower heads to the coldest setting. 

She knows that Hannibal would be disgusted by how _uninteresting_ and _self-absorbed_ they all are, and she doesn’t care. She is miserable, but she can finally see the possibility of _winning_ at something: being the sickest on the ward is something she can do that has nothing to do with him.

Now, each moment of misery is no longer about Hannibal. Instead, the misery and sickness refer only to more misery and sickness, curling in on themselves like an ouroboros. Hannibal is irrelevant, and Bedelia no longer cares if this kills her: she loves it. 

***

Véro is exactly like all of the other competitive, self-absorbed young women on the ward, but with a thick Quebecois accent and a bent for social justice that speaks of a coming-of-age spent churning through reams of thinly disguised eating disorder encouragement on the internet. Bedelia likes her immediately. She wants to ruin and be ruined by her, and Véro obliges. 

They’re sitting in a group after dinner, being watched by nurses as they clench their fists and jiggle their feet and wait to be able to go to the bathroom and dispose of the bits of food tucked anywhere into their clothing they could get away with. Véro has a binder full of pictures of slaughterhouses, and the girls gather around with horrified faces. 

“Cows mourn the deaths of and even separation from those they love, sometimes shedding tears over their loss,” Véro is reading from a pamphlet. “The mother/calf bond is particularly strong, and there are countless reports of mother cows who continue to call and search frantically for their babies after the calves have been taken away and sold to veal or beef farms.” She looks around with wide eyes. “Can you imagine having _your_ baby taken away from you to be slaughtered?”

_None of you are ever going to gain enough weight to even menstruate, let alone have a baby_, Bedelia wants to say, but she can read the room— has been doing nothing but— and refrains. Instead she leans in and coos over the pictures of cows and pigs and chickens dying en masse in horrifying ways. 

“They’re no different from us,” says Véro again, brandishing the literature. “Eating meat is just socially sanctioned cannibalism.” 

Wise nods, sympathetic glances at the photos from the entire assembly. _They_ would never stoop to such things, they all tacitly agree. If they eat meat— if they eat _anything_, sully the purity of their sickness with messy, uncomfortable nourishment— it is only because they are forced. 

And Bedelia stares out the window, watching the passing cars and people outside the hospital, feeling triumphant. Because Véro is right, and that changes _everything._

_Cannibals,_ she thinks.

She locks her eyes on an upscale restaurant, a street meat vendor, a man walking by with a lunchbox. _Cannibals. Cannibals. I would never descend to your level, all of you. And if I did, it was only because I was forced._

She looks at the nurse sitting on her phone by the door, the one with a timer to unlock the bathroom, who had watched Bedelia eat a cup of chocolate pudding (gelatin, made from animal collagen; _cannibals, cannibals_) at evening snack the previous evening.

She grins, sharp toothed and terrifying. _At least I know what I have done,_ she thinks viciously. _The rest of you have no idea. Cannibals, every one._

She tears the drawing of Florence off of the wall before she checks herself out. The strip of tape she’d used to put it up tears both the drawing and the paint on the wall, and she crumples the expensive paper and tosses it in the trash. _You’re not special,_ she thinks at Hannibal. _You’re just another cannibal like all the rest of them._

The program director tries to convince her to stay— she hasn’t gained any weight, and she knows he’s telling the truth when he says she’s at risk of a heart attack. _Cannibal_, she thinks at him, and perhaps this is what it’s like for Will, perhaps the boundaries between metaphor and reality are finally starting to blur, because she has no idea if she’s said it out loud or not, and he signs her discharge papers and hurries her out of his office with a worried expression that she can’t quite place. 

She doesn’t care what he thinks. He is insignificant, just like every other cannibal.

Bedelia walks out of the hospital where Hannibal Lecter sought, arrogantly, to save her life. The cannibals of the world cannot touch her. She is free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes:
> 
> -Bedelia's inpatient ward is full of upper-class young women because that's the demographic that is most likely to have an eating disorder diagnosed and treated. That doesn't mean that that's the only demographic that's vulnerable; quite the opposite. 
> 
> -Bedelia uses veganism as a way to sink further into her illness. Veganism isn't a bad thing, and I don't mean to portray it as such! I would be vegan myself if it weren't for a Rakiesque devotion to cottage cheese on my morning toast. But it _is_ common, for people who are sick enough, to use ethical, financial or other extraneous considerations as excuses to continue restricting and/or have an excuse to avoid entire food groups of "scary" foods for disordered reasons without being questioned by other people.
> 
> -Sorry this story was so weird. If you still want to know me for some reason, come say hi on [twitter](https://twitter.com/teiandcookies) or [dreamwidth](https://tei.dreamwidth.org/)?


	4. Un lamou dou é onté

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _A soft and shameful love_: Will dreams of death. Where Hannibal leads, he cannot follow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Necrophilia.

“The nightmares never stopped, did they?”

Will rolls over from where he had just settled. Hannibal’s face glows slightly in the faint light of the moon filtering in past the curtains. Will is wearing boxers and a t-shirt to bed, as he always does, even though Hannibal is nude; he finds it preferable to be wearing something, so that he has the option of taking it off after a nightmare. “No,” he says. 

With previous partners, he had always apologized for the sweat-streaked sheets he invariably woke up to. He doesn’t have to apologize to Hannibal for that, or indeed anything, which is rather nice. He rolls over and buries his face in Hannibal’s neck. “You don’t mind,” he says, a statement and not a question. 

“Not at all,” says Hannibal, twining an arm around him. “What were you dreaming about last night?” 

He doesn’t want to say it, but it’s hopeless. He loves Hannibal too much to deny him this. “I dreamed that I killed you.” 

He can feel Hannibal’s breath whooshing into his lungs, his arms tightening around Will, his nose nuzzling into Will’s neck. “With your hands?” he asks. 

“‘Course,” Will mumbles. The hair of Hannibal’s chest tickles his nose. He’s hiding in Hannibal’s skin; Will’s pretty sure he can deceive him even if the man were allowed to see his face, but Will doesn’t want him to yet. 

Lies by omission are always better than spoken ones, anyway. Will presses his hips forward and the tightness in his chest unclenches a little when Hannibal pushes back, the warmth of his thighs against Will’s own and his cock pressing up against the fabric of Will’s boxers. 

He will let Hannibal do the lying for him. “How would you want it?” he forces himself to say, and feels the graze of teeth against his shoulder. 

“Slowly,” says Hannibal. “Painfully. I deserve that, don’t you think?” His fingers travel down, over Will’s shoulders and biceps and down his arms, fingertips, sides, hips, until he can slide strong fingers into the waistband of the boxers and pull them down. 

Will shimmies them the rest of the way down and kicks them off somewhere under the covers. It’s something to do to cover up the lump in his throat. The denial and the tenderness that wants to rise up out of him. He forces it down. “You deserve it,” he says instead, husky. 

Hannibal makes a low rumbling sound that Will can feel against his belly. He wants to sink into it. He wishes Hannibal would stop talking. Instead he says, “Organs?”

“Mmm. You would have to take my heart, of course,” Hannibal says. His hands are everywhere, squeezing Will’s balls, rubbing up and down his crack, playing lightly over the tip of his cock. Will puts all his attention into trying to get hard, trying to concentrate just on Hannibal’s hands warm and inviting on his slick skin. He thinks about the little cries of pleasure Hannibal makes when he’s about to come, he thinks about them working in tandem to bring down their prey and tearing each others’ clothes off over the body, he thinks about absolutely anything but the idea of Hannibal dying by his hand. 

“I would feel the scalpel and the bone saw,” Hannial whispers. He’s rock hard against Will’s hip, and Will groans at it. “I could scream for you, if you wanted. Lose control entirely. Would you like that?” 

Will just grunts, and hopes it’s enough. Hannibal’s hand finally wraps around his cock, and he leans into the touch and thrusts and tries to forget that he’s been asked a question. 

He wants to say _please stop, I don’t want to hurt you._ But he can’t say that. Not to Hannibal. Not while he’s gathering both of their erections in his hand and pressing just so and—

“You wouldn’t do it cleanly,” Hannibal says. “Wouldn’t bother severing anything. Just stick your hands in until you can feel it, my heart still pumping the blood that’s pooling on the ground around your feet. Reach around until you can feel it beating against your palms, and _pull_.”

Will’s eyes are squeezed tight shut. He wishes he could do the same with his ears. “_Hannibal_,” he moans, because pleasure and agony have always sounded the same to him anyway. 

“My body would take a while to become noticeably colder,” pants Hannibal. “You could have me then. Quiet and pliant and conquered. It would be an honour.”

Will mashes his face against Hannibal’s chest again, and sobs. Hannibal can believe it’s from pleasure as he spills over Hannibal’s hand and cock. Will won’t say any differently. Can’t. There are no words in the English language that would suffice to describe the despair that’s opened up in him, how Will feels like this has hollowed him out with a marrow spoon. 

_Please don’t die_, he wants to say as he feels Hannibal comes with a cry. _ Please don’t let me kill you. I couldn’t stand it. I know I couldn’t._

He knows he couldn’t, because of the dream. It plays out again before his eyes even while he’s awake, holding Hannibal’s trembling, sated body as he drops off to his peaceful sleep. 

In the dream, Hannibal is dead. Will killed him, he knows with that bone-deep dream knowledge. He is not even allowed the dignity of remembering how. 

And he doesn’t feel triumph or justice. Maybe he ought to, but he can’t. He just feels sadness: a hollow, boring, simple emotion. Hannibal would hate it. He feels it anyway, sadness so deep it swallows him whole and he knows he could never climb out of it. 

Will stares at the ceiling until Hannibal’s breath has long been deep and even. Remnants of a half-remembered language from his childhood float into his mind. Days on the road with his dad, eavesdropping at gas stations and diners and tiny roadside playgrounds. Words he could never say to Hannibal while he’s awake, or even in a language Hannibal could understand.

“Mo linm twa,” Will whispers. “Mo shagrin. Mô lamon çé itou dou é simp pou twa astè; m’olé pa twa chue. Mo sé, mé mo pa.”

_I love you. I’m sorry. My love is too tender and simple for you now; I don’t want to kill you. I should, but I don’t._

Hannibal doesn’t stir. He doesn’t hear, he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t know. Will holds him tighter, and Hannibal snuffles contentedly into his shoulder. 

Wills stares into the darkness and waits for the nightmares to take him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone knows Louisiana Creole, please correct my translations (my best effort from the online [Louisiana Creole Dictionary.](http://louisianacreoledictionary.com/))
> 
> Now with two gorgeous pieces of art by Shatou: https://twitter.com/_shatou_/status/1212730974494019585
> 
> and an alternate ending by lovetincture: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19879624/chapters/52721923


	5. new design

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will wants to make use of the bodies, and Hannibal obliges.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kinkterror prompt: Mutilation/body modification. 
> 
> Also a fill for gay4crystals' prompt on kinkmeme: _maybe he makes some extra pretty lures to wear as earrings, or Hannibal makes some out of human bone for Will to wear? (Bc Hannibal is Crafty™️ like that)_

One wistful glance at the dismembered body in the bag, that’s all it takes. 

Hannibal is alight, and every cell of his being is focused on Will. Will curses himself for being so obvious. Now, of all times, Hannibal will notice if he shows any hesitation. 

“Everything alright, Will?”

Everything _is_ alright. Better than alright. The dead body used to be a law professor who specialized, off-the-books and for exorbitant prices, in visiting students accusing mentors of sexual abuse and providing career advice that conveniently convinced the students to drop the charges. They have her divided into nine different bags. Eight are earmarked for the office inboxes of her eight most recent clients; all powerful men with a history of churning through young, naive mentees. They bought pieces of her, after all; those pieces ought to be delivered. The ninth bag is for breakfast at the end of a long night of making deliveries. 

It’s elaborate, but Hannibal likes elaborate. It involves a lot of breaking and entering, but Will has discovered he has something of an aptitude for that. Will _wants_ to do this. He shakes the momentary doubt out of his head. “Everything is great,” he says, pulling out the list of office buildings and the security measures to be bypassed at each one. 

Hannibal doesn’t push, at least not immediately. They deliver the body parts, and the next day, they wake up to a slow fuck and a late breakfast and everything is perfect. It _should_ be perfect. 

"Do you care about the news reports, now, Will?”

Will is tucked into the corner of the sofa, a little overfull and lethargic from breakfast. His laptop is cradled in his lap, and the online streaming version of the local news is playing. 

He bites his lip. Hannibal’s question isn’t judgemental, exactly just curious. Will of all people is very aware that many serial killers enjoy watching their crime scenes being discovered— including Hannibal, under the right circumstances. Generally, though, watching a news anchor’s pinched-looking face as they stand around on the sidewalk outside of a crime scene, only police tape and other reporters visible in the shot, isn’t either of their idea of a good time. 

“At least this is actual journalism,” he says, and Hannbal ducks his head, tacitly admitting the absurdity of his devotion to Tattlecrime as a source of validation. “But… no. I don’t. Not really.”

Hannibal just watches, knowing full well that he can draw the truth out of Will most of the time just by looking at him hard enough. Will bites his lip and glances back down at the screen, hitting the mute button on the computer. He doesn’t need to hear what the anchor is saying. But even the small glimpse of the scene outside one of the office buildings they’d visited last night draws a vivid picture in his head, one informed by years of working with the FBI. The body parts they’d carefully arranged in the inboxes (and in some cases, playfully, the desk drawers or habitual lunch-spaces in the office refrigerator) of the woman’s revolting clients were now a crime scene, being carefully bagged and transported to be examined for evidence. He isn’t worried about there being any, and it’s unlikely the local police will notice the missing organs and make the connection with a supposedly dead pair of cannibals. He just— 

“You don’t like the idea,” Hannibal says, “of our art becoming evidence. First categorized, then gathered and disposed of, or perhaps returned to a family, if she has one to notice she’s gone. It bothers you. The waste.”

For a moment Will just blinks. He should really stop being so surprised, at some point, that Hannibal knows him so well. “Nicely done,” he admits. “I… yeah. Kind of.” 

Will winces a little at the echo of the word _waste._ He knows that Hannibal knows he doesn’t really think that. Or at least, he hopes Hannibal knows. That Will wouldn’t have spent years alternately chasing and running from him, wouldn’t have even allowed the Chesapeake Ripper inside his head, if he’d thought of his art as _waste_.

Someone else would have, though. Does Hannibal know that Will still sometimes dreams of the words _see, see_? Of a cabin in the woods, of a house where every object bears the imprint of a dead person?

He doesn’t even know why, really. Will doesn’t feel guilty about killing Garret Jacob Hobbs. He didn’t feel guilty when it happened, and he certainly doesn’t now. 

He doesn’t _want_ another cannibalistic serial killer in his head. It’s an annoyance. He only wants— 

“Will,” says Hannibal gently. “I highly doubt that you got the idea from him. You are a formidable hunter in your own right. It is natural that you should have preferences for the fruit of your labours.”

Will lets out a breath. He snaps the laptop closed and shoves it to the side. “Every part of the buffalo,” he mutters. “Yeah, I know, it’s not exactly an original concept. I didn’t get it from him. It’s just… associated with him.” 

Hannibal settles on the other end of the couch, feet stretching out slightly towards Will. It’s a comfortable, easy posture, and Will relaxes a bit to see that he isn’t at all upset. If anything, he seems a tiny bit pleased. 

“Perhaps you could associate it with someone else,” Hannibal suggests. “When Abigail came to me after killing Nicholas Boyle, she categorized it as murder only because she did not make use of his body. Would you prefer to honour Abigail, with our kills?” 

Will’s stomach twists with the easy way he says her name, how casually he can suggest _honouring_ her. He swallows hard before he says, “You’d do that?”

“I would still prefer to sleep on a down pillow in lieu of one stuffed with human hair,” admits Hannibal. “Perhaps there are some parts that could be put to better use as compost. But if you are asking if I would follow your lead in the choosing of the destiny of our next prey, of course my answer is yes.”

Will considers it: making _use_ of an entire human body. He’s not entirely certain what he would do with a lot of it, if he’s honest, but it’s an interesting challenge. And the thought makes the knot in his chest relax, the one that formed as he imagined the unimaginative, clinical crime scenes that the work of the previous night must now be. It would feel better, he decides. More like _him,_ the part of him that chose to live alone in the woods with a pack of dogs and a fishing rod. Nothing to do with Hobbs at all. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, okay. We’ll hunt my way for a while. At least for long enough to find out what way that is.” 

***

“Those are… nice,” Will says. He peers over onto the sturdy wooden table in the back room of the house, that is usually reserved for his own fishing lures. Hannibal is leaning over it now; he’s wearing a particulate mask as he leans close in and operates a rotary tool with a sharp, pointed burr as he engraves the final in a series of… something. Will frowns, wondering if he’s supposed to know what they are. 

There’s four of them, clearly whittled from human bone. The first one looks more or less like a very short needle: chiselled as thin as the bone can go on one end, and only widening up at the very tip, where Hannibal has managed to engrave some thin swirls into the surface. The next two are increasingly wide versions of the same idea, with the intricacy of the engraved design increasing as he had more space to work with. He is working on what seems to be the final piece of bone on the table, which somewhat resembles a lion’s tooth in size and shape. 

“I’m glad you like them,” says Hannibal, which is somewhat ominous. He lapses into silence, and Will squints closer to see that the engraving he is doing on the largest of the pieces of bone are a series of mathematical symbols, jumbled together in a meaningless tangle, which is is copying from a notebook in front of him. 

Hannibal clearly isn’t in the mood to spontaneously offer up information, and Will bristles somewhat at the idea of having to push him, so instead he just turns to go. 

“Stay, please,” commands Hannibal. “I’m almost finished here, and then I’ll be ready for you.” 

Will feels a jolt of fear and arousal crash into him at that, at the casual way Hannibal just _assumes_ he’s going to follow instructions. Hannibal isn’t exactly watching him, but the buzz of the tool has stopped and he isn’t _not_ looking, so Will licks his lips, rubs his fingertips over the scar on his forehead in a gesture that could be an unconscious tic but isn’t. The rotary tool Hannibal is using is much smaller than the bone saw, but there’s still a cutting wheel burr lying on the table, which Hannibal had clearly used for some of the less fine work. It probably wouldn’t make it all the way through Will’s skill, or at least not elegantly. 

He doesn’t actually think that Hannibal is going to try to cut into his head again, but he lets his remembrance of the incident play over his face before deliberately, calmly, sitting down on a chair by the door. 

Hannibal can’t hide the tiny twitch of pleasure of his mouth, and the buzz of the tool switches back on. 

After what feels like an eternity, he seems satisfied, holding the bone carving up to the light before finally setting it down beside its fellows. He pulls off the mask, and picks up the thinnest sliver of bone from the table. 

“Excuse me a moment,” he murmurs, and slips into the kitchen. Will fidgets. He’s rather pleased to discover he’s nervous.

When Hannibal returns, it’s with a tray of tools that he promptly places behind Will, out of sight, and nudges a finger against Will’s forehead to indicate he wishes him to keep his eyes focused forward. Will grins a little and complies. “Okay,” he says, “You’ve tipped your hand. Whatever you have planned can’t be all that bad, if you need the element of surprise to keep me frightened.”

Hannibal’s face is warm, and it’s as good as agreement when he says, “I didn’t ask for you to be frightened, Will, you made that choice on your own.” Will just smiles up at him, feeling peaceful and happy. Placing himself in Hannibal’s hands is both awful, and _easy._ “What’s this about, then?” he says, because Hannibal seems to finally want to be asked. 

“You didn’t think that I would hand over control of the byproducts of our hunts to you without asking something in return, did you?” he says. He’s ripping open a packet behind Will’s head, and Will forces himself to stare straight ahead. 

“I didn’t really think about it,” says Will truthfully. “Kinda assumed if you wanted something, you’d take it.” 

“You were right,” says Hannibal, and Will feels something cold swipe over his earlobe. 

He almost laughs. “They’re _earrings_?” he says, and can’t help a little shiver running through him. The bones of their prey, carved by Hannibal’s hands, inside of Will. The intent behind the idea is clear: perhaps they will be _practical_ with their kills, use as much of the bodies as they can, but this one small piece will be held back: a purely artistic object, a decoration on Will’s body for Hannibal’s pleasure. 

“One earring,” corrects Hannibal as he sets the needle and a piece of rubber against Will’s ear. He doesn’t count or give Will a warning, just punches through the skin in one quick movement, and Will feels a stab of adrenaline before relaxing as the shot of pain subsides. 

“That was the easy part, I’m afraid,” says Hannibal. He’s working some sort of oil into the smallest end of the thinnest bone earring. “The piercing needles is hollow, designed to have the target jewellery inserted into it.”

“And your bone thing is too big for it,” Will sighs, leaning his head back against the wall. He feels slightly dizzy, which seems ridiculous considering how miniscule both the damage and the pain was. Hannibal presses his wrist against Will’s clammy forehead, pushing his hair back while keeping his fingers clean of Willl’s sweat. He pushes his hair back, then presses a soft kiss there. 

“You’re beautiful when you’re like this,” he whispers. “I should do this more often.” 

Will groans, eyes closed and stars dancing in front of his eyelids as Hannibal starts pushing the bone into the new hole in his ear. It’s not excruciating, but it’s a deep nauseous sort of pain that makes him want to squirm away. He doesn’t, though; instead he sucks in deep breaths and puts the worry of fainting out of his mind. If he faints, he’ll simply wake up to the job being done. 

Will’s pretty sure he didn’t actually pass out, but it still feels like coming back to himself when he feels Hannibal’s cool, dry hands on the side of his face. His ear is a dull throb of pain, and he can feel the end of the bone earring pressing slightly into the skin oh his neck just behind the lobe. 

“Mmm,” he groans, not wanting to open his eyes yet. “Good?” 

“Exquisite,” says Hannibal, and flicks the tip of his finger against the earring just to watch Will jerk in sudden agony. He squints open one eye, to watch Hannibal’s delighted face through the stars still bursting in his vision. 

Hannibal’s mouth covers his, which is a welcome distraction. Will leans in, letting Hannibal’s tongue probe his mouth and Hannibal’s hands guide his head. “It will be at least six weeks until the next one,” Hannibal whispers against his lips, and Will groans. He’d nearly forgotten about the other three pieces of carved bone on the table. 

The kiss must last a long time, because by the time Hannibal pulls back, the dizziness has subsided and Will feels only a slight, tired shakiness. He holds on to Hannibal's shoulders to help him stand, then makes his was to the work table by himself to look at the other bone earrings. 

He picks up the largest one, imagining having something that thick in the piercing hole. The skin would certainly never go back to normal, if it were removed after that. But then, compared to everything else he and Hannibal have changed about each other, an earlobe is the least of his worries. 

He looks at the symbols carved into the bone, and glances down at the notebook they came from. 

Hannibal smiles. “When I was younger, I thought perhaps I would eventually find a way to reverse time,” he says. “Foolish. But in many ways I am glad that I failed.” 

Will places the earring back on the table. He’s sure he won’t see it again until it ends up inside him, and sure enough, Hannibal sweeps the remaining ones into a small cloth bag. “You wouldn’t have let me change you, if you had succeeded in turning back time,” Will says. 

Hannibal crowds into him and tugs on the back of the earring, and a wave of pain nearly causes Will to buckle over, but he can’t help smiling even as he gasps into Hannibal’s shoulder. “God, you’re awful,” he mutters, and feels Hannibal’s answering smile against his cheek. “I wouldn’t turn it back either.”


	6. Sacrifice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Will Graham languishes in jail, Abigail stays with Hannibal, and waits. 
> 
> She knows there is nothing to do to stave off the inevitable, but old habits die hard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Captive

For the first little while, Abigail tries to be a good houseguest. 

This is mainly with the intention of figuring out whether or not she is, in fact, a houseguest. 

When, on the night she decides to test the question, she manages to slip out of Hannibal’s house at half past one in the morning, she decides perhaps she is. She hadn’t had much of a plan before she did it, mostly focused on staying absolutely silent as she snuck down the stairs and out the door. She takes a city bus to a McDonalds and eats a greasy hamburger under the harsh fluorescent lights. 

When she returns, a lamp is on in the sitting-room, and Hannibal is sketching from an armchair. “Good morning, Abigail,” he says, he voice drifting out into the front hall the moment she opens the door, and she clutches the inside handle as she is caught by a wave of fear so intense she nearly vomits from it. 

She squeaks “good morning”— it is, technically, morning— and scuttles up the stairs to her bedroom. It feels like an eternity that she waits to hear footsteps outside her door, or perhaps the sound of a knife being sharpened. She is fairly sure that she is, in fact, a captive. 

Being a captive is actually a significant improvement on being a houseguest. For one, she no longer worries about not being sophisticated enough to live in Hannibal’s house. He’s the one keeping _her_ there, so he can deal with her rooting through the kitchen for snacks while he’s away, leaving dirty dishes in the sink and forgetting about her laundry in the washer until it’s mildewy and she has to run it through again. She asks him for a speaker, which he provides, and she plays Top 40 radio stations in her room whenever she isn’t sleeping. She grows bolder and starts simply giving him lists of things she wants, clothes and books and DVDs, and they appear. Eventually she finds a credit card on her desk, with a false name on it but no instructions as to the limit, and she simply buys whatever she wants herself.

So being a captive takes the pressure off, at least on that front. And anyway, it’s a role Abigail is familiar with. She’s been a captive her whole life.

All you have to do survive captivity is figure out what he wants, and give it to him. Hannibal doesn’t care that she’s messy, doesn’t care that she spends his money on clothes and entertainment and silly decorations for her room. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t _want_ something from her. 

She knows she hasn’t got it right. She _knows_ Hannibal is different from her dad, he doesn’t want the same things, even if she sometimes recognizes the cuts of meat on the table for supper. But that doesn’t stop the nervous, shaky feeling she gets every time she things about how long it’s been since she’s hunted. 

Hunting, Abigail knows deep at the very core of her, is essential to her survival. The longer she goes without luring in a victim, the more likely it is that she’ll _be_ the victim. There is, it seems, no way to convince herself that this may no longer be the case.

They do go out together, sometimes. Abigail’s hair is cut shorter now, and coloured lighter. “Just for a little while,” Hannibal had assured her as he’d led ushered her into the back door of a salon, and she’d acquiesced. _Just for a little while._ He was going to have her colour her hair back, after a little while? Why? Or was that supposed to be her life expectancy?

They go— to Abigail’s surprise— on college tours. Hannibal wears a t-shirt and jeans and the instant they set foot on a college campus he looks so much like a bewildered dad that she nearly bursts out laughing. At first it’s short trips, liberal arts colleges with pretty campuses and inspiring histories. Then, one day, they get on a plane instead of in the car. Abigail forces herself not to ask what they’re doing, but it turns out they’re going on yet another college tour— at the Sorbonne. Hannibal hands her a stack of brochures, as they check into a hotel that evening, and tells her to choose her top three for them to visit in the next week. She chooses Palermo, Cologne, and Milan, pretty much at random. 

It doesn’t really matter. Abigail is pretty damn sure she isn’t going to be going to university in Europe. She can’t shake the feeling that she isn’t going to be going to university at all, that she isn’t going to be alive long enough to make it through an application process. 

There’s no particular reason why. Hannibal isn’t overtly threatening, besides the fact that he’s kidnapped her. He’s kind, in fact: when she can shove down the dread far enough to be able to approach him, he’s eager to have her help cook, or show her his drawings, or tell her about places he’s visited. 

It doesn’t help. Abigail knows, in the part of her that’s left over from her previous dad, that she needs to find a victim, and soon. It itches under her skin. 

They’re in Cologne when Abigail finally suggests it, taking a tour of the library. There’s a girl a little bit older than Abigail— probably a potential grad student— but another American, a thin brunette who mutters to herself in English. It would be so easy to sidle up to her, say something about her useless German classes back home, make her feel comfortable. Ask her to coffee, maybe they could go to a museum together. Perhaps say that her feet hurt, and can they just stop by Abigail’s hotel for a moment for her to change her shoes? She can practically feel the satisfaction, the _relief_, in the moment when her dad takes over, and Abigail knows she is spared for a little while longer. 

She wants that relief more than anything. 

On the way out, as the tour group scatters, Abigail nudges Hannibal, and when he glances down at her, she nods towards the girl. 

“That’s who I’d choose,” she says. 

Hannibal goes very still. They’re standing outside in the sunshine, and students and tourists pass around them like waves. The girl is stopped at a crosswalk, checking her phone. 

“Do you want her?” Abigail says. “I’ll help you. I’ll show you how we did it.” Her heart beats in her chest like a rabbit’s. _Please want her._

“Perhaps,” says Hannibal, “If you wish to give me a demonstration, it would be better to postpone it until we are at home.” 

Abigail can see the logic of that: she’s seen Hannibal’s suitcase, and there didn’t seem to be enough room in it to fit knives and bone saws and whatever else he needs to make his kills. 

“Okay,” she says, and the anxiety crawling under her skin subsides a little bit. It’ll be back, she knows. “Yeah, okay.”

***

It takes about two days to get over the jet lag. On the third day, Abigail loads the dishwasher after dinner. She usually intentionally skips out on the washing up, wondering how far she can push her complete lack of consideration and responsibility. She’s realizing there may not be a limit: Hannibal has never asked her to do any sort of household chore, or even to refrain from creating more chores from him. 

The part of Abigail’s mind that keeps her awake at night, suggests that perhaps he doesn’t mind because he knows he won’t have to put up with it for much longer. And her skin itches for a kill. 

“I’m going out,” she says, and her voice wavers a little with nerves. Besides that first attempt, she’s never actually gone out without Hannibal before. She could go running to the FBI. She’s pretty sure Hannibal knows she won’t. 

Hannibal doesn’t object. He tilts his head up a little, interested. 

“Be ready when I come back,” she says. “I don’t like to have to keep them talking for too long, once my dad is here. And I don’t like watching.” She feels a bit more confident, now that hasn’t forbid her from leaving. “That work for you?” she asks. 

Hannibal sets to work filling the leftovers into glass containers. He’ll take one to his office with him for lunch, a little piece of normalcy that delights Abigail, that she wishes she could tell Will. Maybe she’ll be able to, some day. 

“As you wish, Abigail,” he says, and she nods and heads upstairs to get dressed. 

***

Her _first_ dad hadn’t let her hunt this way. Abigail had wanted to, was sure that she’d be good at it, but she’d only asked the once, and he’d said absolutely not. She’d dropped it; it wasn’t really the kind of topic she wanted to discuss with him all that much. 

She suspects Hannibal would have no such reservations. But she hadn’t asked him for permission, and he hasn’t asked how she planned to snare her victim. Perhaps he’ll ask her afterwards. She realizes that she wouldn’t mind telling him, at least if everything goes as planned. She _wants_ to. 

The nightclub she’s chosen is above a restaurant, and advertises itself as a “lesbian lounge.” Abigail feels jittery as she approaches, like someone’s going to ask for lesbian credentials as she enters and discover that her only sexual experience so far was making out with a greasy-haired boy whose name she no longer remembers behind the outhouse at summer camp. In reality, the only credential they ask for is her I.D., and Abigail has that. Hannibal had aged her up a few years in the passport he handed her before they’d headed to Europe, presumably to avoid the potential hassle of being legally responsible for a minor. 

After that, it’s _easy._ She’d known it would be, because she’s hunting, and something primal and fundamental slots into place when she hunts. She hunts because she is under threat, but she also _is_ a threat. She could do anything in this state; ordering a drink and making her way to the centre of a crowded dance floor is effortless.

By the time she catches the eye of a pretty, slightly tipsy blonde girl, Abigail is actually enjoying this: dancing by herself, feeling free and unwatched for the first time since the day her dad died. Since the day she met Hannibal. She sidles over, simply dancing _beside_ the girl in a completely shameless way that she never would have attempted if she weren’t high on whatever feeling it is that hunting gives her. 

Marina is an art student, and she’s just drunk enough for metaphors and endearments to spill out of her more easily than actual sentences. She perks up a bit when Abigail says, “Sorry— I just need to take a bit of a break— I just got back from Europe, I’m a bit jet lagged,” and they stumble off the dance floor to find somewhere to sit down. Marina grills Abigail on all the cities she had just visited, gushing over all the art that Hannibal had wanted to see. Abigail had refused, but he’d talked enough about what they were missing that she could pretend otherwise. 

Marina is very pretty. She looks like the boundaries of her blur, like Abigail can’t figure out where her big eyes end and her cheekbones start, can’t tell if she’s sitting up straight or slouching dramatically. She has mascara smudged around her eyes and Abigail can’t tell if it’s intentional or not. Abigail keeps leaning in closer to try to piece her together, get a sense of the whole person in front of her, who keeps slipping away from view. Marina leans forward, too. She doesn’t look much like the Minnesota Shrike’s victims, but then, Abigail doesn’t either, any more. 

Abigail doesn’t really remember much of the kiss behind the outhouse at camp, but she’s sure this one is better. Marina clearly has some idea of how to do this, keeps coming in and nipping at Abigail’s lips and then drawing away, making Abigail chase her. 

Abigail blinks, swallows. _Hunting._ She puts a hand on Marina’s, tentatively. “Do you want to…” Abigail licks her lips. “I live with my parents. It kinda sucks. But they’re away right now.” __

_ _Marina just grins and grabs her hand, and Abigail feels a swell of triumph. She follows Marina out of the club, training behind like this whole thing was Marina’s idea, and she’s reminded of Hannibal. Hannibal, who always wants to be _asked._ Who can convince you to do anything and make it seem like your own idea. _ _

_ _She feels a stab of regret that she won’t be able to go any further with Marina, once they get home. She’d told Hannibal to be ready right away, and she’s certain he’ll oblige. _ _

_ _They take the subway, giggling at all the other drunk people and playing with each others’ fingers. Marina’s hand starts rubbing over her lower back even as Abigail fumbles with the front door, and then— _ _

_ _And then— _ _

_ _

_ _Abigail lies on her bed, not pulling the sheets down. She makes her bed every day, because that’s what she’s always done. Her messiness is just for the rest of the house; her bedroom is her refuge. _ _

_ _Marina had screamed once. Hannibal had put a stop to that quickly. _ _

_ _Abigail had wanted to stay and watch, a little bit. She’d never felt that before. With her first dad, she was always just glad that her part was over, and she could go hide in her room and pretend she didn’t know what was happening. _ _

_ _The basement in Hannibal’s house is far enough away from Abigail’s bedroom that she couldn’t even hear him moving around. There was no indication that someone was being butchered in the house. It’s peaceful. Abigail _should_ love it. _ _

_ _This is the moment she’s been waiting for, chasing. The serenity she feels after she drags a sacrifice to the altar. Her peace of mind has always come at a high cost, but it’s always been _worth_ it. _ _

_ _Abigail feels no peace now. She wishes she had Marina’s warm body in bed with her. She wishes she was watching what Hannibal was doing right now. She wishes this could feel like it used to. _ _

_ _She wishes she could believe that offering up this sacrifice had bought actually bought her any more time._ _


	7. A Chance Meeting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal and Will roleplay a very different kind of hunt. 
> 
> It turns out the kind Hannibal wants is different still, but Will is adaptable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Hunt
> 
> CN: Rape roleplay.

“A… scotch and soda, please.” Will can hear the waver in his voice. It’s not quite what he’d normally drink, but it’s also not too far away. Even after a long walk to the bar that was intended to be head-clearing, Will still hasn’t quite decided who he is. 

The drink is half Will Graham, and half not. Nobody else in particular— he hadn’t been able to decide on a person to slip on, for tonight. The idea of doing so was actually somewhat repulsive. 

Nobody else is allowed what Will is going to have tonight. 

The bartender sets the drink down in front of him. The bar is one that caters to tourists, all of the staff speaking English more or less fluently and willing to be patient with those who want an opportunity to stumble through phrasebook drink orders in Italian. Will clears his throat. He hasn’t really looked yet, but he can see him out of his peripheral vision, and he can practically _feel_ him even more than that. “And…” He jerks his head to the left. “Whatever the gentleman at the end would like.” 

The bartender just nods. Will watches him move off, and takes a sip of his drink. The fizziness of the soda is matched uncomfortably by the nervous fizz in his stomach, and he wishes he’d ordered the liquor on its own. 

“He says _grazie mille_, the bartender reports indifferently, and Will rolls his eyes. “‘Course he did,” he mutters. 

He finishes the rest of his drink, takes a deep breath, and strides down the length of the bar to sit down beside Hannibal. 

He’s drinking beer, which Will raises his eyebrows at. Hannibal doesn’t take the bait. Will hadn’t expected him to: this was _his_ goddamn idea, it would be pretty disappointing if he slipped the moment Will sat down beside him. 

(_If you really could turn back time,_ Will had asked, as they looked down from their balcony at the young couples spilling out of bars and nightclubs in the warm, scented evening, _Would you bring us back, over and over again? If we could go back enough times to do it over, is there a world where we meet like them?_

Hannibal’s arm was tight around him as he said, _We could,_ and Will wondered placidly, for about the millionth time, if that insanity plea maybe had something to it. 

But of course, that wasn’t what Hannibal had in mind. Of course he would have to turn it into some strange game. _You could hunt me_, he said, _properly. Like them._ Will didn’t bother pointing out that _hunt_ probably isn’t the word most people would use to describe picking up dates in a bar. _I’m a terrible actor when I’m being myself_, Will warned him, a little bit giggly at the idea. He wanted to, though. Will _wanted._)

“I’m Will,” he says. He doesn’t offer his hand to shake. Handshakes— he recalls from a time when he used to actually meet people who aren’t Hannibal— are clammy and uncomfortable. They require eye contact to be effective. Will lets his eyes slide off of Hannibal’s, the way they had the day they first met. It feels strangely good. He wouldn’t want it all the time, but it feels comfortable to allow himself to slither away from Hannibal’s gaze, a comfort he hasn’t felt in a long time. 

“And I am Hannibal,” Hannibal answers, and Will is a little surprised that he doesn’t want to burst out laughing. He wants to press his body up against Hannibal’s warmth, rut into him right here in the bar, but he can’t do that. Not yet. _If this were really our first meeting,_ he thinks a little dizzily, _and I really wanted him as much as I want him right now, what would I do?_

Will knows exactly what he would do, because he’d done it a few times: in college, before the sleaziness of the whole thing started slipping under his skin and making him want to crawl under his blankets and never come out with every quick, easy fuck. It’s so _easy_to seduce people, when you can empathize with them. So easy to mold yourself around the shape of another person, be exactly what they need for a night. 

But then, the entire point of this exercise is to _not_ know Hannibal the way he does. Isn’t it?

Will just licks his lips and laughs, letting his gaze trail down into the polished countertop of the bar. “I’m… not really sure how to do this,” he admits, which— yes, is probably the thing he would say if this were real. If he met Hannibal in a bar, and the man were as unreadable as he had been on the first day they’d met in Jack’s office, that is probably what Will would say. 

He wonders if Hannibal knows just how at a loss he is. It feels good to be lost, to ignore everything he knows about the man. To return to the feeling that had first made him want to lean in to him; when Hannibal was a mystery, and felt like a cool sheet of glass against the fevered heat of Will’s gift. 

Still, it leaves him stuttering when he’s trying to _pick him up_ in a goddamn _bar._ He takes a deep breath and resolves to try again. Like maybe a _normal_ person would. 

An hour later, things are not going as planned. 

Hannibal is polite. He’s polite the way Will sees him with people who are going to be dinner, only without the glint in his eye that is reserved for only Will to see. Will’s attempts at conversation elicit courteous answers of appropriate length. He doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t probe into Will’s psyche. 

Will wants to punch him. He also wants to fuck him. It’s not like the two have ever been mutually exclusive, but right now he can’t do either, because he’s stuck in a Italian tourist bar embarrassing himself trying to pick up his own goddamn husband.   
Oh. _Oh._

(_You could hunt me properly, like them_, Hannibal had said, gesturing down to the drunken bar-goers on the cobblestone street. Will knows the statistics. They’ve dined on back-alley rapists more times than he can count— a menu plan Will had suggested, and Hannibal had easily accepted as being entirely in keeping with his aesthetic preferences.)

Will’s tongue curls in his mouth. He presses it up against his teeth, letting Hannibal see him turn predatory. “Am I bothering you, sunshine?” he asks. 

He can see Hannibal’s stillness. Hannibal doesn’t like lying, even for the sake of a character, even when Will would know the truth anyway. 

“I appreciate your offer of the drink, and the companionship,” he says. It’s not the slickest truth-as-lie Will’s heard from him, but it’ll do. Now that Hannibal can tell he’s within reach of getting what he wants, the glass wall that Will has been throwing himself against for the past hour is beginning to give way. 

“Perhaps you ought to head on home,” Will suggests. “It’s getting late, and I hear the city gets unsafe at night. You don’t sound like you’re from around here.” 

Hannibal throws him a dirty look for that, a real one— admittedly a low blow, when Hannibal’s Italian is practically perfect. 

Will doesn’t care. He watches Hannibal leave, and feels _hungry_. 

Of course Hannibal wouldn’t want to be wooed politely, their first time doing this. Perhaps they’ll get to that later, but now, if Hannibal could turn back time and start over, he would want Will to be the one who broke _him_ first. He would want to offer himself up to the violence that itches beneath Will’s skin, watch it shine out of him with no coaxing whatsoever. 

Greedy, psychopathic little fuck. 

Will throws down money on the bartop for the drinks, and ignores the bartender’s vague look of concern as he follows Hannibal out into the night. 

He’s in an alley, because of course he is. Leather shoes and expensive pants and silk tie and all. There’s mud on the wall that Will throws him against, and he immediately covers Hannibal’s mouth with his hand, because he has no idea how Hannibal wants to play this and he doesn’t intend to find out that whether or not he wants to be loud. 

“One sound,” he whispers, “And you’re fucking dead. Don’t think I wouldn’t. I have. _Often._” 

He can see the bob of Hannibal’s throat as he swallows, feel the saliva against his palm as his lips part slightly. He wonders if Hannibal will bite him, fight back. 

If this is some sort of metaphor to represent an inversion their meeting and entanglement with each other, Will cannot figure out whether Hannibal is supposed to fight back or not. Did Will fight back, all those years ago? He can’t remember. Perhaps every move he had made away from Hannibal was actually a step towards him. 

Hannibal nods, and Will slowly removes his hand from Hannibal’s mouth, testing. 

“I’ll be good,” whispers Hannibal, huskily, and Will feels his knees go weak. “Fuck,” he whispers back. “Turn around. Drop your pants. You jackass.” 

The last word is not exactly in character, whatever character he’s supposed to be playing, and Hannibal’s eyes narrow slightly as he does as he’s told. Better, in fact: with his pants and underwear down around his ankles, restricting his movement, Hannibal folds his arms and leans against them on the filthy stone wall. Bracing himself. 

Will had brought lube to the bar, because he was prepared for a whole lot of eventualities, only some of which featured them getting back to their apartment before crashing into each other. He hadn’t imagined he’d be forcing himself on Hannibal in a filthy alley, but a failure of imagination on Will Graham’s part is mostly an entertaining novelty to him, so he lets it go. 

He’s hard, has been hard pretty much since he realized what Hannibal as angling for in this game, and he lets Hannibal hear him groan as he slicks himself up. A group of drunk teenagers walks past the entrance to the alley, and even though Will’s chosen a spot that’s mostly in shadow, he can tell that the girl who turned her head and then quickly whipped it back got an eyeful, and he can’t bring himself to care. 

He can barely see well enough to line his cock up with Hannibal’s hole, just slips around skin on slick skin until he catches on the rim and pushes in with no warning at all. Hannibal makes a bitten-off little choking sound, dropping his arms further down the wall and straining his ankles against the prison of his own pants to try to open himself up, give Will better access. 

Will just grabs his hips and pushes. If Hannibal wants it to hurt, Will will allow that for him. And Will feels _desperate_ for it, wants to fuck into Hannbal in a dirt alley like he’s never gotten to touch him before. 

“Is this how it felt?” He hisses into Hannibal’s ear, because now that he’s balls-deep inside him Will has no interest in pretending that they haven’t met before. No interest in pretending that this is a new story, and not just another chapter in the one they’re already living. He crowds forward, forcing Hannibal upright, making sure Hannibal’s chest and thighs and cock make contact with the filthy wall he’s being fucked against. “Is this how it felt, when you decided to take me? Was there a moment, when you looked at me and said _mine_? Or was it gradual?”

Will sees stars behind his eyes when he realizes that Hannibal is rubbing up against the wall, not just letting Will’s thrusts push him into the stone but actually contributing to the effort. He’s going to be filthy, covered in scratches and dirt. Will redoubles his effort, and for a moment he just enjoys the sounds of their panting breathing and the slap of skin on skin in the echoing space. 

“It was gradual,” Hannibal manages to pant out. “I consented to the invasion that is love as little as you did.”

Will rolls his eyes. “Oh, fuck you,” he says, and he does. 

After they sag sticky and spent against the wall, after Will awkwardly helps Hannibal pull his pants up and brushes the dirt off his shirt, after they walk home hand in hand past hordes of other couples who barely give them a second glance, Will insists on cleaning the cuts. 

“This is hardly necessary,” says Hannibal, watching as Will gently, painstakingly wipes a cloth over each one before rubbing antibacterial ointment on them with gentle fingers. 

Will just pushes him down onto the bed, spreading him out like the entire front of his body is a workstation. He chuckles. “None of that was _necessary,_ Hannibal.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“I would tell you to warn me in advance the next time you want to be… _hunted_,” says Will. “But I think that would be a lost cause.” His fingers play over a particularly nasty scratch on Hannibal’s hip. “But yes. And I enjoy this bit too. After all— you patched me up afterwards, too.”

_Afterwards._ Hannibal had never laid a finger on Will without his permission, but then, he’d never needed to. 

If there is an _afterwards_ for Will— a violation that took place for a certain amount of time, and then ceased— then perhaps it is, now, truly behind them. 

Perhaps they don’t need to turn back time, after all. Will dresses Hannibal’s wounds, and time moves forward.


	8. nobody else will be there then

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A shared memory palace; nightmares, delirium. 
> 
> Will sacrifices, and it's enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Nightmares  
[Title](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyXNlH_4pp0)

As if Hannibal were somehow built for maximum drama at a level that is actually _cellular_, the infection waits. 

It waits as they drag themselves out of the ocean, as Will bandages Hannibal’s bullet wound with shaking hands, as he drives and drives and drives with his heart in his throat as they cross the northern border.

Every time he catches a few hours of sleep on the road, Will dreams. He’s not certain if he should call them nightmares, any more: he still wakes gasping and sweating, but instead of the pure animal fear of his previous nightmares, all of his waking emotions seem to be accessible to him in these new dreams. Sometimes he’s at the fishing-stream; sometimes he’s in the cellar of Lecter Manor, or exploring the grounds. Eventually he realizes the stream _is_ Lecter Manor, with that irrefutable dream-logic that never makes any logical sense upon waking up. Once he realizes they’re the same place, though, he finds he can separate them; within the dream, he can place the stream in a ravine beside the mansion, and look out at it from a window. 

They find a cabin in the woods in northeastern Manitoba, one that looks so much like the Wolf Trap house that it makes Will’s heart ache. Will dreams again their first night there, and when he inevitably wakes shaking in the darkness of the early morning, he reaches out and feels the solidity of Hannibal’s body beside him. It feels safe. Now they are somewhere that they can both recover properly. 

Only Hannibal doesn’t. _That’s_ when the bullet wound in his stomach turns from tentatively improving to something tender and swollen that Will doesn’t need to be a doctor to tell at a glance isn’t _right._

It shouldn’t be possible. He wasn’t running a fever for the past _week,_ and now he’s burning up, sweaty and delirious. But so many things are impossible about Hannibal that it hardly seems worth even thinking about. Instead Will just tries to keep the wound clean, tries to keep him drinking water, tries to prevent himself from taking Hannibal’s temperature so often he drove himself crazy. 

The first night that Hannibal’s fever registers over 102 degrees, Will falls into a dreamless sleep for the first time since— 

— Will Graham has never slept like this. 

***  
_Hannibal opens his eyes and steps back from the edge of the stream._

_He squints out into the rushing water. He expects to see Will, wants to see him. Instead he can look through the water, like a God’s-eye view of creation: he can see every fish that passes by, and feels a stab of regret that nobody is there to catch them. _

_He turns, and he is at the entrance to his memory palace. He considers the stream. He hadn’t chosen to put it there, but he doesn’t mind that Will didn’t ask him first. In fact, he prefers it. This place must belong to both of them. _

_He steps downwards, into the older and more dangerous part of the palace. The part he doesn’t go any more, hasn’t for a long time, for fear that the slightest nudge against one of the foundations of the palace will send the whole thing tumbling to the ground. Will left something else here without asking. Hannibal cannot return until he finds it, and Hannibal wonders if he will manage._

***

Will doesn’t want to leave Hannibal, but he also doesn’t want him to die. He drives into a tiny town and prays he isn’t recognized as he ineptly fakes a fever at a walk-in clinic and insists on antibiotics. Perhaps they will do nothing, but at least he tried. 

He fusses, worries, nearly panics and brings himself back from the brink several times. “Don’t die,” he whispers to Hannibal as he lies in bed beside him the with lights off, the heat radiating off of Hannibal’s body like a furnace. “It was supposed to be both of us, at the cliff. If one of us is staying here, we both have to.” 

He falls asleep easily. If he dreams, they are peaceful dreams that he doesn’t remember in the morning. He tries not to think about the fact that he’s never slept so well as with Hannibal Lecter slipping away beside him. 

***

_Hannibal wants to go back to the stream. He wants to find Will; this is their memory palace, after all. They ought to share it. _

_If he’s honest with himself, though— and Hannibal tries his best to be— the main reason he wants to find Will at the stream is that he is terribly afraid. _

_There is something in the cellar of Lecter Manor, the heart of his memory palace, buried so deep he is not entirely sure he can access it. He no longer wishes to travel alone into the buried places in his own mind. _

_As he descends, the smell of wine and rotting flesh rises. Hannibal closes his eyes, and finds that he can call up Will’s pendulum behind his eyes. This place is so suffused with Will Graham now that Hannibal can try on Will’s mind, in the same way Will can usually try on Hannibal’s. It is reassuring, even exciting. He pushes forward. There is something here that Will needs him to see._

***

Hannibal gets worse. Will is sleeping so soundly that he mostly doesn’t notice what Hannibal is saying in the night-time; but he’s slipping in and out of consciousness by day just as much as in the night, and he’s speaking nearly constantly. The most unintelligible bits he assumes to be Lithuanian; Italian he recognizes but cannot attempt to understand, and French is the most frustrating; Will spends hours trying to run it through the bits and pieces of French-adjacent creole he’d picked up as a kid, and mostly comes up blank. 

Until one evening he is settling in— still, despite everything, enjoying the novelty of dreamless sleep— and he runs his arm down Hannibal’s back, firmer than he had dared to before. It feels wrong to touch him when he’s like this, because he’d wanted Hannibal to _remember_ the first time Will caresses him in bed. But he is accepting that he may not have that option. Perhaps caressing him while he is still _alive_ is the best Will will ever be able to do. 

And then Hannibal’s head turns, and his eyes open. He recognizes Will, and Will hears the English word _dragonfly._

And he knows where Hannibal is; the same place Will _isn’t,_ any more. 

Will wonders if Hannibal would characterize this as a punishment from the same God that fished them out of the ocean. Or merely a price, perhaps. They can be together on Earth, but they can never be together in the memory palace. In dreams, in delirium, in the darkest recesses of their minds, they must always be alone. 

Will closes his eyes for one more night of sleep. 

***

_ When Hannibal finds the dragonfly man, he wonders if he should pray. _

_He gets down on his knees. It would be pleasant to think that he can pray to Will, or to the dragonfly himself, but he’s never prayed to Will on his knees. He’d like to get the chance, but he’s no longer certain he will. _

_The last time he prayed to God in this cellar, Hannibal realizes, his prayer was answered. Not in the way he’d hoped it would be, but answered nonetheless._

_God cannot save him now, he recognizes; only Will can do that. But in Will’s absence, he could do worse than to talk to God to pass the time. _

_Tėve Mūsų, kuris esi danguje  
Teesie šventas tavo vardas…_

***

Will considers going back to the clinic in town, pretending some other complaint, getting some sort of prescription. There are plenty of medications known to induce nightmares. Even just a high dose of cold medication might do it. 

He doesn’t. The idea of undertaking this experiment with prescription drugs, as there were anything at all logical or scientific about this, feels utterly wrong to Will. He hikes out into the forest, and picks the first batch of mushrooms he finds. 

Perhaps they will kill him. If Will dies, Hannibal will likely die too; but then, if Will does nothing, Hannibal is going to die anyway, and Will would rather be dead too. 

Perhaps they will do nothing. If so, Will will add it to his growing list of grievances against God. 

Will eats the mushrooms. He wonders if perhaps he should sautée them, at least, but he doesn’t. If all goes well, Hannibal can be disgusted with him later. 

***  
_Will is in the middle of the stream. The current is strong, and running towards the shore feels like he is moving in slow motion. The feeling doesn’t go away once he is out of the water and sprinting towards the castle; if anything, his body responds slower the faster he tries to force it to move. _

_This, Will recognizes with grim amusement as he pushes his way into the wine cellar in panicked slow motion, is classic nightmare fodder. He wishes he could laugh at that, but the relief he feels at it is nearly overwhelming. _

_Will is alone.The dragonfly man hovers in the air above him. Beneath, there is a table set for two; one plate is already used. The other contains a cut of meat that Will cannot quite place. _

_Will smiles. They can never dine together, here. Hannibal has been and gone. _

_He sits down to eat. _

***

Will wakes soaked in the familiar brine of salty sweat. There is a warm weight on his stomach. He gasps and rockets to a sitting position, heaving air into lungs that feel like they haven’t taken a breath for hours. 

The warmth that was resting on his stomach is now around his shoulders: Hannibal’s hands. Hannibal, sitting up. Looking at Will through clear eyes. Smiling. 

“You took my place,” says Hannibal quietly, and Will feels weak with relief. He can only lie back on the damp sheets and stare up at Hannibal’s soft, loving face. 

“You saw it,” says Will, and then, “Thank you for the supper.” He reaches out and touches Hannibal’s forehead, no longer feverish. He trails the touch down his face, and Hannibal allows Will to map him with his fingers: the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, his cheekbones, across his nose, the soft curve of his lips. 

Will pulls him closer. They can be together in this world, and that is enough.


	9. trick or treat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal and Will prepare for Halloween.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: game

“Gummy bears. _Fuck,_ gummy bears. I’m an idiot.”

Hannibal raises his eyebrows archly. He is, indeed, carefully pushing a colorful array of gummy bears out of their molds. 

Will sighs, presses himself up against the other side of the counter. “This is what you wanted that whole damn body for. The rapist who nearly didn’t fit in the trunk. For _gummy bears._” 

“It would have been impractical to extract and clean all of the bones required at the scene, certainly.”

Hannibal had clearly been firming up the candies in batches all day; several bowls are full of them, and there are a few measuring cups of colourful liquid still left to be poured into the molds and refrigerated. Will reaches into a bowl and tries one. They’re the perfect combination of soft and chewy, with a small, tasteful kick of sourness. 

“Wash your hands,” Hannibal instructs. “You can start bagging them.” He points to the other end of the counter, where there’s a box full of small cloth bags. 

Will is moving towards the sink even as he says it, but he still does say it. “You’re seriously going to hand out candy for Halloween.”

“We live in populated area now, Will. There are sure to be children who will come by.” 

Will just shakes his head incredulously. It’s true that over the years, he and Hannibal have gotten— if not sloppy, at least comfortable. As far as the FBI knows, they’re long dead, and they were never well-known in France to begin with. After a certain number of people had guessed at Hannibal’s accent in French being Russian-tinged, he had leaned into the impression for their next move, and Will’s creole-tinted attempts at the language are at least enough to label him in most people’s minds as something other than a likely former FBI agent. They’ve made acquaintances in this town, if not friends. They could stay. They can hand out cloth bags full of homemade candy tongiht, and parents will allow their children to eat them. 

Still. _Gummy bears._

Will dries his hands and drags the box of candy bags over to the bowl of finished gummies. “So is this… a tradition?” he says. “Did you do this in Baltimore?” 

“Of course,” says Hannibal, whisking the brightly coloured mixtures a few more times and beginning to pour them into the molds. “Everyone on my street participated in trick-or-treating. It would have been noticeable if I had refused.” 

Will picks up a few bears and and drops them into a bag, looking at the level critically. There’s no need to be stingy, but Hannibal is probably right that there will be plenty of children coming around, and there’s no reason to have to close up shop early. “That’s not why you did it,” says Will. 

“Of course not,” admits Hannibal easily. He slips the tray into the refrigerator and glances at his watch to note what time to take them out at. Then he crowds up behind Will, chest against Will’s back, chin on his shoulder. “Why did I do it?” he asks with a smile that Will can feel against his cheek. 

Will scoffs. “All you need to do is put a mutilated squash on your front deck, and people come straight to your door and ask you for food. Of course you wouldn’t pass up an opportunity like that: food is how you own people. It’s a game to you. Getting away with it.” 

“Mmm.” Hannibal grips him tighter, and Will squirms despite himself as he tries to keep depositing candies in bags. Hannibal’s hand reaches around and plucks one from the bowl, managing to raise it to Will’s lips with surprisingly good aim, and Will accepts it with a small lick to the tips of Hannibal’s fingers. 

“Naughty,” comes a soft, amused whisper in his ear, and then Hannibal steps away. Will’s back feels cold without him for a moment, and he twists around to watch Hannibal as he asks, “And before that? Did you have Halloween… as a kid?”

Hannibal is washing his hands again, clearly preparing to come join Will in bagging the treats, and he just raises his eyebrows. 

Will stares back into the bowl, smiling a little ruefully. “Okay, no Halloween for Soviet orphans, I could have guessed that,” he admits. 

He feels the ghost of a kiss pressed to the side of his head before Hannibal settles beside him, dropping candies into bags. Will breathes a tiny sigh of relief. The phrase _soviet orphan_ feels like a strange one to apply to Hannibal, even though it is entirely accurate. It feels like Will might somehow get in trouble for saying such a thing out loud, when Hannibal would prefer to be nothing more or less than exactly what he is. 

It _always_ feels dangerous to mention that Hannibal has a past, which is why Will tries to do it whenever he can. 

To his surprise, Hannibal offers more. “This—” waving to the array of candy in front of them— “is an American holiday,” he reminds Will. “As in France, any tradition imported from the US must be viewed with suspicion. We will receive plenty of excited children tonight, but their parents and grandparents will perhaps be less enthusiastic. The same would be true in Lithuania.” 

Will scoops up the last few of the candies and ties off the final bag, looking over their work. What was once the bones of a heinous man— Will had picked him out himself— is now gelatin in candy for already oversugared children. “Yeah,” says Will. “You start letting strangers give candy to your children, like they do in _America_, and before you know it you’ll be eating people.”

Hannibal grins, the one that’s wide and slightly crooked and just for Will. He feeds Will another gummy bear, just because he can.

“Dangerous indeed,” me murmurs, and goes to set the candy in place for the evening.


	10. every love story is a ghost story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will didn't die on the shores of the Atlantic. 
> 
> If only he could convince Hannibal of that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Fear/Phobias
> 
> I'm sure the joke in this fic existed prior to this speech, but I adapted it from David Foster Wallace's commencement speech [This is Water.](https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/)
> 
> Title [also a DFW reference, ](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/d-f-w-tracing-the-ghostly-origins-of-a-phrase)originally a phrase either of Christina Stead's or Virginia Woolf's.

“I’m sorry,” whispers Hannibal. 

Will turns his head on the pillow. It’s not the first time that Hannibal has said it— he’d said it the instant they emerged from the sea— but it’s been a few weeks. It’s the first time that he’s said it while not being under the influence of delirium and drugs. It’s the first time that Will can’t brush it off, can’t explain it away. 

Will has no idea what to say. 

Hannibal isn’t waiting for an answer, he’s burying himself in Will’s skin like Will might disappear in an instant. It’s better, it’s something Will can respond to properly. He winds his arms around Hannibal’s back and pulls him close, holds him tight, and he feels something suspiciously like a sob against his chest. 

Will’s heart clenches, and he feels a stab or a peculiar anxiety. It’s the exact anxiety that he usually _doesn’t_ feel with Hannibal: the fear of being buffeted by emotions not his own, of entering into the kind of exhausting feedback loop of sadness and empathy that had characterized all of his previous relationships. 

Will has already forgiven. But he doesn’t want to say it out loud. Not again. 

He doesn’t _want_ Hannibal to be sorry. Will presses his lips together, holds Hannibal tighter, and resolves to say something, just— not now. Next time. 

***

Next time happens the first time that Will wants to go fishing. 

“I can get some supplies in town,” he says. “Nobody is looking for us here. It will be fine.” 

And Hannibal stares at him like he’s watching something twisted and tragic happen in front of his eyes, and says, “Am I supposed to come with you? What part of my mind is it that desires this?” He shakes his head, his eyes drifting away from Will’s. “I don’t understand.” 

Will blinks, frowns. That was— both confusing, and perilously close to Hannibal being _rude._ “You… don’t have to come with me, no,” Will says. “Either into town, or to the stream, I just thought— I thought you might want to?”

He knows Hannibal wants to, or at least that he wanted to. The concept of a stream, of fishing, is the foundation of Will’s memory palace. Of course Hannibal wants to come with him. It doesn’t make any _sense_ how Hannibal is looking down, staring out into the distance, looking anywhere but Will. 

Eventually he sighs. “I don’t know if I should be encouraging this in myself,” he muses. “An unfortunate feature of psychiatry is that it is difficult to self-administer. Then again— it hardly matters, at this point.” He turns back to Will, and comes right up to him, crowding in as if he were going to kiss him. Instead he just brushes a fingertip down Will’s cheek, closing his eyes. “So solid,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry, Will. I’m so sorry.”

“Please don’t,” chokes out Will, breathless. It’s the only thing he can think of to say, and he’d promised himself he was going to say _something._

It’s Hannibal, though, so of course he doesn’t stop just because he’s been asked. His hands are on Will’s face more roughly now, and he says, “I promised— I promised to keep you safe. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

_You never promised that,_ Will wants to say, but for all he knows Hannibal had, so instead he just says “I am— Hannibal, we’re safe now. I am safe.” It would be a stretch to say Hannibal had _kept_ him that way, so Will doesn’t. It doesn’t seem to matter, though; Hannibal’s stricken face looks like he’s been shot. 

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and then, “Of course we can go fishing. We can do anything you want. Anything you want, for as long as I live.” 

***

Will wakes up to the point of a knife pressing against his stomach. 

He gasps, lies very still, feels the way the cold point of metal shakes slightly as Hannibal keeps it pointed directly over the scar on his belly. The moment feels like it’s suspended in syrup; everything is moving very slowly. He doesn’t want to say anything out loud. It might break whatever spell is keeping them there. 

Hannibal might push the knife in, or he might pull it away. Will isn’t sure he wants to know which one he’ll choose. 

But he wants to know _why._ So that’s what he says, finally, long after he’s certain Hannibal knows he’s awake. The single word sounds raspy and too loud in the still night air. 

Hannibal doesn’t move the knife in either direction. “Please tell me what to do,” he whispers. 

Will licks his lips. He cannot think of a single thing to say. 

“If I kill you,” Hannibal says, “Do I die, too? What part of me are you?”

_We can both live now,_ Will doesn’t say, because he knows if he did it would come out pleading and desperate. _Hannibal, we lived. You can let us live now. What’s _wrong_ with you?_

Because there is, very definitely, something wrong with Hannibal. 

“We were both supposed to live,” says Hannibal, and then the pressure on the knife increases as he says “I’m _sorry_—“

And then Will _understands_, and he grabs the blade just as it pierces his skin. It slices a thin line along his fingers but he manages to pull it away before it any more than nicks layer of skin and fat on his belly, and Hannibal’s hand goes limp the moment Will moves, letting Will throw the thing across the room, away from them. 

He doesn’t care about the blood running down his stomach or his hands. He grabs Hannibal’s face, and he can feel the tears already on his cheeks mixing with Will’s blood as he forces Hannibal’s eyes to meet his. 

“You can kill me,” he gasps. “Hannibal, it’s me, it’s Will. I’m alive, and you can kill me if you want to. I won’t stop you. But only if you know what it is that you’re doing.”

Hannibal shakes his head. His eyes slide down, like he can’t bear to look at Will right now. _You see too much, you don’t see enough._ Will shakes him, suddenly angry. “Shit, Hannibal, you’re unbelievable. You thought I _died_?”

“I saw you go limp in my arms,” whispers Hannibal, “And I prayed for you to come back to life. I cannot honestly believe that God saw fit to answer that prayer. I _can_ believe that my own mind refused to allow you to pass out of this world.” 

Will takes a deep breath, trying to calm his racing heart from the aftermath of nearly being stabbed. He presses his hand to the scar on his belly, rubs over it. It feels good, and when he slumps back onto the mattress, he carefully places Hannibal’s hand over the scar. 

Hannibal just stares, his fingers becoming slightly tacky with the blood from the scratch of the knife. 

Apparently, Hannibal thinks that Will is a figment of his imagination. Will strokes over the scar on his forehead contemplatively, while Hannibal’s hand begins to gently explore the one on his belly. “So,” says Will, “Have you just been categorizing it as masturbation every time we fuck?”

That surprises a laugh out of Hannibal, but evidently it’s close enough to the kind of thing imaginary-ghost-Will would say that he just rubs more firmly over Will’s stomach, dipping lower to take hold of his cock. 

“The best masturbation of my life,” Hannibal admits as he bends to kiss him.

***

The problem is, being a figment of Hannibal’s imagination comes naturally to Will. 

They recover, and they sleep, and they have sex, and when they’re strong enough, they hunt. It’s blissful, which is probably part of the problem: it’s exactly the kind of life that Hannibal would have dreamed up for him and his imaginary dead boyfriend. Will can hardly blame him. 

And besides— if Hannibal thinks Will is dead, who is Will to disagree? It’s not like he’s ever had a particularly strong sense of self. Perhaps living only in Hannibal’s mind would feel exactly like living in the real world. 

Perhaps he’s _never_ lived in the real world, and the bone arena of Hannibal Lecter’s skull has made up his universe all along. 

Sometimes Hannibal looks at him with such intense sorrow and regret in his eyes that Will wants to slap him, would do anything to be able to convince him that Will didn’t die on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. He remembers his “death,” even, remembers waking up spluttering from the water in his lungs and with his body one unified mass of pain, but that the only thing he cared about was that he was with Hannibal. 

He tries telling Hannibal his version of events, but Hannibal just nods wistfully, like it was all exactly what he would have made up himself. 

Eventually, Will stops trying all that hard. Hannibal seems glad to have him here, seems to have decided that killing Will would not be an effective psychiatric intervention for Hannibal’s hallucination. It’s enough. 

***

Hannibal is reckless, now. Will understands why: he thinks he’s alone, and the most important thing in his life is keeping an imaginary ghost in his head happy. Still, that doesn’t make it any less stupid that Will allows himself to be talked into an ice fishing trip that extends far too late into the evening. 

By the time they’re back at the car with their catches, there’s a full-on blizzard buffeting them, and it’s far too dark and snowy to attempt the narrow side roads back to the house. 

It’s not like they’re going to die. They’ll just be cold and cramped in the car until morning. Will builds a fire, wondering if Hannibal thinks he’s building it himself. He guts one of the fish and cooks it up into something edible, if not entirely presentable. 

Hannibal looks at him like he’s something miraculous, but Will knows that look by now. He knows that Hannibal is giving thanks for his own memory palace, the development of his own mind that allows him to sustain a fully realistic Will Graham 24/7. 

Conceited asshole. 

They curl up on the backseat of the car, Will more or less on top of Hannibal. They don’t have enough gas to run the car, but it’s not cold enough for it to be dangerous for them to sleep. It's actually fairly comfortable, and Will sighs contentedly. 

“You ever hear the one about the guys in the bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness?” he asks. 

There’s a pause. “I have not… heard that one,” says Hannibal. 

“Two guys are sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness,” says Will. “One of them is religious and the other’s an atheist. They’re arguing about the existence of God.”

“In my experience, atheists and believers can coexist entirely peacefully in social situations, Will.”

“Shush. The atheist says, ‘Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard. I was lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow prayed: God, if there is a God, I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’”

“Opportunistic,” Hannibal murmurs. “He only turns to God when he requires a miracle. He has made no contributions to God’s creation.” 

Will ignores that. “So now,” he continues, “in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled, and says ‘Well then you must believe now, after all, here you are, alive.’ And the atheist rolls his eyes and says, ‘No, man, all that was was the local Inuit happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.’”

Snow falls peacefully around the car. Everything feels muted, like the rest of the world has faded into irrelevance around the two of them. “I have not heard that one before,” says Hannibal again, quietly. 

There’s a tremor in his voice that sounds very much like hope, and Will clings to it. 

“You never could entirely predict me,” Will whispers, and lays his head down on Hannibal’s chest. He falls asleep to the beating of his heart.


	11. Even Steven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal makes Will an offer. It's the thought that counts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: psychological manipulation 
> 
> I'm gonna be pretty tied up with family stuff this weekend-- have a small thing I wrote on my phone while half-watching a football game.

The moment the doctor enters the room, Hannibal sinks further down into the mattress and turns his head away.

“If you have the test results,” he said, his voice crisp and commanding despite his posture and the fact that he’s wearing a hospital gown that barely covers his ass, “Please convey them to my husband outside the room.”

The doctor glances from Hannibal to Will, slightly surprised but seemingly willing. Will frowns, glances at Hannibal, and can’t pick up anything that might explain why Hannibal suddenly doesn’t want to know what’s happening to him. 

Will just shrugs and stands, following the doctor out of the private room and shutting the door behind him. She’s businesslike, looking at the top of a stack of papers in her arms. 

“The elevated pressure of the lumbar puncture suggests meningitis,” she says, “and the bacterial culture indicates the initial cause as listeriosis. Public health officials are not aware of an active outbreak of listeriosis in this area. Have you and your husband travelled recently, or do recall him consuming meat that could have been tainted?”

_We regularly travel around Europe, and he thinks that chewing on raw flesh at crime scenes is delicious, hilarious and sexually appealing,_ Will thinks. 

“No,” he says. 

She just nods. “A resident will be along to discuss a change in medications shortly,” she says, “But the wide-spectrum antibiotics he’s currently on are a good start.”

Will slips back into the room, and Hannibal doesn’t look up. If Will were anyone else, he would assume that it was simply the lethargy of the illness. But it isn’t. Will can feel an undercurrent of excitement, that Hannibal is _doing_ something. He practically feels exhausted on Hannibal’s behalf: if ever there’s a time he could just _relax_, surely this is it. 

“So?” says Hannibal. “Would you like to take me home?”

Will frowns at the odd phrase, and at how Hannibal can make him feel like Will is still the one being psychoanalyzed even when Hannibal is the one in the hospital bed. “I can’t,” he says slowly. “You—“

“Of course you can,” interrupts Hannibal. “You can do whatever you want.”

Will sits down on the chair at the side of the bed. He’s about to try again, to relay the diagnosis to Hannibal, but he stops himself. Hannibal clearly doesn’t want him to, and Will wants to know why. 

“I can do whatever I want,” he repeats, then sighs. Meningitis. It’s not encephalitis, but it’s close. And Hannibal doesn’t need to know the diagnosis to understand that this is a chance to place himself in Will’s hands. 

“Is this your dumbass way of apologizing?” he asks. 

“Of course not.” Hannibal turns his head slightly to look at Will, wincing at the movement. “I would not place you in a position to repeat an exploration that I felt had been a mistake.”

Will nods. He has to smile, despite himself. Hannibal is, quite possibly, insane, meningitis or no. Offering to allow Will to deny him medical care is… rather sweet, in a way. 

“I appreciate the offer,” Will says finally, honestly, and reaches for Hannibal’s hand on top of the covers. “We’re going to stay here for now. But hey— compromise. If you promise not to guess what you’ve got, I promise not to tell you.”

Hannibal smiles, finally relaxing back into the sheets. “Keeping your options open.” 

“With you? Always.”


	12. Evil Minds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack is determined to catch Hannibal. And he knows what he needs to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: mental breakdown.

Jack Crawford isn’t quite sure if he has a job any more.

He thinks about Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham every moment of the day, now. It’s not like he’s going to stop doing it if the FBI stops paying him, so he figures he might as well keep showing up to think about them in his office. Money keeps appearing in his bank account, which is helpful in that it helps clarify that he probably does still work for the FBI. 

He doesn’t particularly care about the money otherwise. Bella’s savings accounts would be enough to live off of, especially since he doesn’t exactly have a packed social calendar these days. Jack figures once the FBI stops paying him, he’ll finally have lost his last excuse not to expand his search to the Continent. 

But he’s not ready yet. Jack knows that. He can finally see clearly: and this time, he’s going to be ready. He knows what he needs to do.

The victim he chooses isn’t a murderer, a rapist, or even a particularly successful fraudster. She’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted list only by a narrow technicality. Which makes her perfect. Vigilantism, Jack suspects, would not be sufficient; but her scheme to defraud new immigrants is _irritating_, strikes Jack as _rude_ in just the way he imagines would warrant this kind of response. 

Finding her is easy, which he’d anticipated. Killing her is also easy, which he’d been vaguely curious about. He’s no Will Graham, or at least not yet; he can’t simply slip on another persona to do the dirty work. But Jack has killed innocents before, or so he reminds himself. He’d killed Bella. He’d killed Beverly and Miriam, or at least failed to save them. 

He’d killed Will, or at least he’d like to believe he had, because the alternative is worse. 

It takes one to catch one; Jack knows that now. He knows it as he crushes the fraudster’s fragile neck, and it snaps beneath his hands like a twig. He knows it as he spreads her body out on a tarp in the back room of the house, the spot where Bella used to spread out her yoga mat in the morning where the rising sun enters the window just so. He knows it as he (inexpertly, messily) cuts into her and realizes he has no idea what bits are good to eat. 

The Evil Minds museum is long gone. Will was right; it was a stupid name. Still, Jack knows what he meant to show there. What the public would never understand or consent to believe; that the defining feature of an evil mind is the ability to warp reality around itself. 

Jack wants to warp reality the way Hannibal could. When he stops showing up to the office, and the paycheques stop coming, he doesn’t care. With every kill, Jack understands more. He’s certain of only one thing: that if he can get close enough, strong enough, if he can fuel himself with the radiance of human flesh for long enough, he can catch Hannibal. 

Jack has always been a practical person. Goal-oriented. Not much for metaphor. So he hunts, and kills, and eats, and doesn’t think about the fact that Hannibal Lecter is inside of him, owns him, every bit as thoroughly as he owns Will Graham. 

One day he will catch him. Jack is sure of it.


	13. blood–brain barrier

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A cabin in the woods: where Will can be safe, and Hannibal can be seen. 
> 
> Also, Hannibal has a lot of mosquito bites.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: bloodsuckers

“You ready? Come here.” 

Hannibal glances up. Will is sitting on the bed— _their_ bed, which is still something of a thrill to think, even if they’ve done nothing in it but sleep, so far. And change bandages, which is what Will seems to think he’s about to do, but—

Hannibal swallows. He’s glad that the wound in his stomach is finally healed enough to not require daily cleaning and bandaging. But now Will seems to have forgotten, and is sitting on the bed with a tube of ointment waiting for Hannibal to come sit beside him and be tended to, just like every night. And Hannibal can’t, because there is nothing to tend to. 

The idea that Will is offering touch and Hannibal cannot find an excuse to reach out and take it makes him _furious._ He wishes the wound in his stomach would open back up and fester. He’d rip it open with his bare hands if it weren’t for the fact that Will would probably disapprove of that. 

Hannibal keeps his face impassive as he says, “Will, I no longer require bandaging.”

Will just waves the tube in the air. “Yeah, but the bloodsuckers ate you alive carrying all that wood today. C’mon, I’ve seen you scratching your legs up all evening. Let me put afterbite on you.” 

Will says it so god-damn _casually_ that for a moment Hannibal is nearly taken in. After all, this living-off-the-grid experiment is really more Will’s domain than Hannibal’s. Perhaps, for the kind of person who chooses to live in a cabin in the woods in rural Virginia, it is only logical to rub afterbite on the mosquito bits of your… housemate. That is what they are, after all. Perhaps, in the absence of a pack of dogs, Will’s caretaking instinct would transpose itself onto any living creature when ended up hiding out in the woods with him. 

Then Hannibal’s mouth is very dry, because he’s fairly certain that this is not a regular feature of life in the woods. 

“I can do it myself,” Hannibal says, because he has to, wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t push back as hard as he can every time he’s offered something he wants. 

Will’s face falls a little, and Hannibal wants to clutch at him and beg _closer, closer, please look at me closer_, but he doesn’t need to, because of course Will does. Will always looks closer. It feels like an invasion, Will Graham trying to figure out what Hannibal wants. Hannibal holds still for it, as emotionless as possible. 

“You won’t, though,” Will says after an amount of time that is beginning to make Hannibal’s heart race with fear and anticipation. “You’re going to let me do it. Come here. Pants off.”

Hannibal tries very hard not to be shaky on his feet when he stands up, and he succeeds, because he has had quite a bit of practice in just barely controlling his limbs when Will Graham is around. 

He pulls down his pants when he reaches the bed, staying upright and businesslike as he does it. He folds them, neatly but not fussily, on the bedspread. Will glances down at his bare legs, chuckling a little as Hannibal sits down beside him on the duvet. 

Will is right: Hannibal is completely covered in bites, and he has not handled them well. His nails are too short to do much damage, but most of the square footage of his skin below the waist is pink with scratching. 

“Idiot,” says Will affectionately, and Hannibal’s heart clenches, because Will talking to him that way is something new; the easy warmth and complete lack of fear. He wants more of it. 

Hannibal inspects the damage himself. “There is,” he tries in his own defence, “A certain visceral pleasure to it. Scratching hard enough to replace the mild irritation of the itch with simple pain.”

First Will just blinks at him, then he throws back his head and _laughs_, the way Hannibal isn’t sure that he’s ever seen him laugh before. The way maybe Will can only laugh when he’s truly _safe_, and if that’s the case, Hannibal wants Will to be safe more than anything else in the world. 

“Of course,” says Will, wiping tears from his eyes, “Of course. If only you’d told me sooner, Hannibal, I could have fit that into the profile. ‘The Chesapeake Ripper experiences a persistent emotional itchiness, which he would prefer to replace with outright pain than allow to continue.’” 

“That’s not what I meant, Will,” but Hannibal cannot prevent the corners of his mouth from twitching as he attempts impassivity. 

“Sit back. Show me the tops of your legs,” Will says, and Hannibal does, scooting back on the bed and placing his hands behind him, fingertips forward, to lean on. Will runs a hand down his left leg, from just above the knee to his ankle, where one of the bites bled slightly earlier in the evening. 

Will leans in and uncaps the tube he’s holding, running a finger over each bite to find the centre before letting a drop of stinging ammonia fall onto it. Hannibal tamps down the urge to flinch out of sheer habit; it would take more effort to show pain than to hide it, at this point in his life.

But of course, as soon as the thought has crossed his mind, it won’t leave him alone. The idea of allowing Will to witness his pain is intoxicating; even more so because the pain involved is so small. If Will can laugh, here in their cabin in the woods beyond the end of the world, perhaps Hannibal can flinch. 

Will drops the stinging liquid on a particularly scratched-up bite, and Hannibal tries it. He doesn’t quite succeed in allowing his natural reactions to take over, but he twitches slightly, a tiny bit artificially, and Will looks up. 

“Alright?” says Will, and that teasing amusement is back, and Hannibal wants to take Will’s face in his hands and hold it in just that expression, forever. 

“It stings,” says Hannibal, because he has always found honesty to be the best policy. Especially the kind of honesty that doesn’t give anything away. 

“I’ll put lotion on after,” says Will, and his head is dipped back to his work with the ammonia by the time he says it, so Hannibal has to simply sit back and wallow in his shock at the idea of what’s coming next. 

He should ask. 

Hannibal knows he should ask. He should ask, because the logic of this place is clear, now: Will can laugh, and Hannibal can flinch, and Will can offer just enough to manipulate and tease: but now, of all times, Hannibal is going to have to have a taste of his own medicine. Will wants him to _ask._

And Hannibal will, he realizes. It’s only fair. But first, he wants to draw this out. 

Will finishes with the ammonia, and Hannibal has to admit that it _does_ feel better. “Are you going to ask me if I’ve learned my lesson, Will?” he asks mildly, as Will reaches for the bottle of skin lotion on the nightstand. 

“Sometimes I think you’ve never learned a lesson in your life,” Will mutters, pumping a glob of the unscented white cream into his hands. He doesn’t hesitate or give any indication that he’s doing anything out of the ordinary, that he’s about to touch Hannibal skin-to-skin, purposefully, _soothingly_, like they’ve never touched before. His hands are strong and nimble and Hannibal stares down at his fingers as Will reaches up to place both palms on Hannibal’s upper thigh and stroke downwards. 

Hannibal gasps, and this time it’s not artificial, not even particularly intentional. Will looks up, unable to conceal his surprise that Hannibal let himself do that, and Hannibal tries to hold his eyes. He feels anxious, shaky, yes even _itchy_ like there’s something under his skin trying to get out. Every previous time he’s felt like this, he’s tried to kill Will. Pain is preferable to the incessant noise of itch. 

He’d like to try something different, now. 

Will’s hands stroke down one leg and then the other, soothing the irritated skin and simultaneously causing a far worse fire to flare in Hannibal’s belly. He rubs the lotion in, not allowing the firm touch to tip over into scratching at the already irritated bites (though Hannibal wants it to, God; he would have preferred that Will take care of the tiny wounds by clawing at Hannibal’s skin until he tore it right off.) He holds Hannibal’s gaze as he does it, inquisitive. Inviting. 

Hannibal has always been able to trust Will to _know_ him. If Hannibal revealed himself, it was only because Will cracked open the door into his soul first. So it feels _unfair_ that in this, the one remaining way they don’t know each other, Hannibal is going to have to _ask_.

He is perfectly willing to do something unfair, at this point. 

“Keep touching me,” he whispers. “Please.” 

Will could make him ask again, he realizes. He could pretend not to understand, he could force Hannibal to beg for every single touch and act, and Hannibal would do it. But he doesn’t, because there are limits to both of their cruelty. 

Will just smiles, pure and joyful, and kisses him so hard Hannibal is pushed onto his back from the force of it. 

“_There,_” Will sighs into his mouth, his lips and teeth and tongue entirely too distracting, “Was that so hard?”

Hannibal feels like his brain is about to short-circuit, and hopes that whatever expression or set of sounds might take over at that point will maintain some sort of dignity. Then Will has his hands still slick with lotion rubbing up under Hannibal’s shirt and over his nipples, and he no longer cares— for possibly the first time in his life— about dignity. 

Will can tell, and Hannibal can tell that Will can tell, and he doesn’t care. “_Pretty_ please,” Hannibal growls, and feels Will’s answering grin against his cheek even as Will is undoing the buttons of both of their shirts while biting sloppily at Hannibal’s earlobe. 

“Very nice,” admits Will, and it’s easier to remove their own clothes past a certain point, so Will sits up to shuck everything off. Hannibal has a bit of a head start, needing only to remove his shirt and underwear, so he can reach up while Will’s arms are still tangled in his sleeves to be able to grab him roughly by the shoulders and bite at the skin of his chest. 

“Yeah,” Will pants, and he’s grinding down on Hannibal’s lap. It’s suddenly so _easy_: no barriers between them, Will’s smile open and easy and Hannibal feeling bare, like his entire self is inside out and it no longer hurts to have Will see the hidden places. Will’s hand comes down to wrap around Hannibal’s cock and he jerks and moans involuntarily; the sensation bypassing the part of him that makes _choices_. There are no more choices to make, there is just this. 

He doesn’t need to ask again. Will has always let him do anything, and especially now that Hannibal has _asked_, has said _pretty please_, Will certainly isn’t in any state to demand even more requests. But Hannibal finds he wants to; he wants to hear Will say it. Hannibal jerks his hips up and reaches over for the lotion making his legs slippery. He messily slicks in between Will’s asscheeks with it, and Will gasps and leans forward, gripping Hannibal’s shoulders tightly. 

“You make the same sweet sounds as you do when you’re dying,” Hannibal murmurs into Will’s ear as his fingers play over Will’s hole— because as long as he’s out of control of his body, he might as well let his mind loose, too. And Will just whimpers louder, completely shameless, so that Hannibal actually has to speak a bit louder when he asks, “Can I, Will? Can I be inside you?”

_Can I be inside you again?_

And Will nods, and the sounds he’s making barely change as Hannibal finds his entrance and pushes in. He sets his teeth against Hannibal’s shoulder, and Will is all around him. Hannibal can barely do anything as Will starts raising and lowering himself on Hannibal’s cock, his teeth pressing into Hannibal’s skin with every thrust. 

“You can hurt me, Will, if it helps,” Hannibal has the presence of mind to offer. Will’s body comes down around him particularly vigorously, and he hears the ghost of a sentence that sounds like _don’t need your permission_ before Will’s teeth break the skin and he feels blood running down his shoulder. 

“It never helped,” Will says then, and then Hannibal feels wet warmth against his stomach and Will shudders, “Hurting you never helped.” 

_Do it anyway,_ Hannibal completely fails to say. He’s certain his grip on Will’s hips as he pumps into him will leave bruises the next day. He wants to see them. 

Will collapses on top of him. He’s surprisingly heavy, every pound of sinew and muscle somehow finding a way to poke into sensitive places and restrict Hannibal’s breathing. Hannibal just enjoys it, sucking in air like it’s a miracle just to be able to breathe.

Which it sort of is. After a few moments, he realizes that the wet feeling on his shoulder isn’t just a trickle of blood, and he turns his head just in time to see the tip of Will’s tongue retreat back into his mouth. 

Will actually looks a little sheepish, which is absurd. He has a smear of blood he’s clearly unaware of at the corner of his mouth. 

“You can have more,” Hannibal offers mildly. “Within reason. Losing you to haemochromatosis would be disappointing, at this stage.”

“Oh my god.” Will just lays his head down on Hannibal’s chest, but he’s smiling, soft and fond. “No, I’m good, thanks.” 

Hannibal closes his eyes. Will, happy and sleepy and safe. And Hannibal, flayed open to the core, never to be hidden away again, content. He presses a kiss to Will’s forehead. “You’re preferable to the other bloodsuckers.”


	14. fugu sashi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Either Hannibal is testing God, or he's just making dinner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: shapeshifter

“You don’t have to keep testing Him, you know.”

“If I am testing anyone,” says Hannibal, “It would be logical to assume that it is myself.” His voice is quieter than it usually is while cooking; he’s always laser-focused, but usually willing to be distracted for a moment by Will. Now, he stares down at the fish in front of him. He’s set up a stream of water to run over it, with the flow of blood-tinged water directed downwards into the sink. The thing is still twitching slightly as he removes the fins and tail. The mouth opens and closes gapingly. 

“Okay, but I’m a bit beyond simply making the _logical_ assumption, when it comes to you.” Will leans against the countertop, looking over carefully. He’s not _afraid_ of the fish, exactly. He might be a tiny bit afraid of Hannibal at the moment, but the fish is the symptom, not the cause. 

Hannibal flicks the long knife underneath the skin, turning the fish over slowly so that the skin appears to peel off effortlessly. Only when the slightly translucent skin and pink underbelly is entirely exposed does he ask, “What assumption would you make instead?” 

There’s a plastic container on the side of the counter that could be the sharps bin in a public washroom. Will picks it up and places it within Hannibal’s reach, and Hannibal drops the skin into it. The underside is still slightly studded from being distended in the fish’s last moments as a living creature, and Will finds himself fascinated despite himself. He ignores Hannibal’s question, and instead asks, “Did he blow up for you?”

“Of course; that’s part of the experience.” Hannibal makes a cut in the side of the fish, and the entrails begin to spill out. “Our friend here is a shapeshifter. I’d like to consume the echo of all of his forms.”

“Should have called me down to see it,” says Will, a little petulantly. 

“My apologies,” Hannibal offers, and after a few twists of the knife that Will can’t quite follow, the entrails join the skin in the bin. 

Will sighs, and feels a flutter of nerves in his belly, because as much as he tells himself that he’s going to stay out of this particular match with God, he knows he’s deluding himself. 

“My try wasn’t good enough for you?” he asks, because Hannibal is going to figure out what he’s really asking eventually, so he might as well get it out now. Once dinner is ready, he suspects they’ll want to concentrate on the meal. 

“I’m not trying to kill us,” Hannibal says. 

“I wasn’t either, on the cliff. Try harder, Hannibal, you already knew that.” 

The fillets that Hannibal has ended up with on the cutting board are tiny, compared to the size of the fish. Will swallows hard, looking at them. He’s never actually worried about Hannibal killing him _accidentally_ before, but now he’s getting close. 

Hannibal places the knife down of a moment and sighs, stretching out his shoulder and flexing his hand a little. He’s clearly been holding tension in his body for quite a while, and it’s not exactly reassuring for Will to see signs of Hannibal’s nerves. 

“You were giving God one last chance to take us back,” he says, and his body relaxes as he looks at Will, smiling softly. “He chose not to. Now you worry that I feel compelled to conduct my own experiment of the same sort.” 

Will gestures at the poisonous fish. “If the shoe fits.” 

“If God wanted us back, he could take us any time,” Hannibal points out. He slices the sharp edge of the knife through the fillet lengthwise, somehow keeping his fingers out of its path. “You recall my hobby of collecting church collapses.”

“We’re not in a church,” says Will. 

“Not with that attitude we aren’t.” 

Will can’t help it; he snorts with laughter, and catches a glimpse of Hannibal’s slight smile as he begins slicing the paper-thin fillets of fugu into bite-size pieces. They join an assortment of vegetables, mushrooms and tofu on a platter. “So what is this, Communion?” Will says. 

“No,” says Hannibal. “It’s only dinner.” 

Will takes his place at the table. It’s pointless to ask what they’ll do if the fatal neurotoxin in the puffer fish’s insides found its way into the bits that Hannibal is serving: they’ll die, is what they’ll do. Will isn’t exactly knowledgeable about fishing anywhere outside of the US, but he knows enough about this species to recall that the toxin paralyzes its victims, rendering them incapable of speech or movement but still conscious until they eventually asphyxiate.

“This is completely unnecessary,” he mutters, one last protest before giving in to the inevitable. 

“Nothing about my kitchen is necessary,” Hannibal acknowledges. “Merely desirable.” He picks up a piece of fish and places it in his mouth, and Will reaches forward to do the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you need more info on the food.... [The Art of Preparing and Eating the World’s Deadliest Fish](https://www.kobejones.com.au/the-art-of-preparing-and-eating-the-worlds-most-deadly-fish/)


	15. The Winds of Change

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal Lecter isn't a top scarer. Hes not even on the leaderboard at Monsters Incorporated; but what he is is an _artist_, specializing in extracting screams from even the most reluctant screamers. 
> 
> Then, he gets assigned to a boy named Will Graham.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: tentacles
> 
> All of my kinktober fics so far have been taking place in a vaguely canon-compliant space, which is kind of my comfort zone. And I totally intended to keep it that way for the month... and then the [Danish dub of Monsters Inc happened](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9yXUCMubAQ). So, yep, Hannibal just... is Randall in this fic.
> 
> I owe many monsterfucky thanks to lovetincture, mars, featheredstag, kuzu, grantaires, and thebeespatella for a sprawling Hannibal/Monsters Inc exploration in Discord. May it continue to be fruitful!
> 
> **In case the premise doesn't make it obvious: this comes with a BIG MASSIVE UNDERAGE WARNING. Because. Monsters Inc. Also fairly dubcon, if you don't consider inviting your nightmare to fuck you to be fully informed consent.**

There is, in the secretive basement laboratories of the Monsters, Inc office building, a certain Division. 

The potential profit from each individual child being so high— and the risks equally high— it is profitable, of course, to keep each individual child in the scream database for as long as possible. It’s generally accepted that, after a certain point generally correlating to the age of the child’s puberty, the screams are no longer an effective form of power for the city of Monstropolis. 

It is only known by very few researchers— those tasked with implementing algorithms that predict when each child will need to be removed from the system— that the effectiveness of screams does not change dramatically at any point in a human’s lifespan. The point that a child needs to be removed from the scream database has nothing to do with the effectiveness of their screams. It’s just that, at a certain point, the children stop _screaming._

And given the toxicity of the human child’s touch to a monster, it is imperative that each child be removed from the database before the age at which they cease being frightened of the monster under the bed, and start trying to fuck it. 

This research, due to its sensitive nature, is kept strictly confidential. The rank-and-file monsters of the company trust the labs down below to do their jobs and keep workers safe. And they do. Usually. 

***

Hannibal Lecter is not a top-ranking employee of Monsters, Incorporated. He’s respected, to be sure; he has seniority with the company, younger scarers who look up to him, respectable numbers. But he’s never made Top Scarer, never broken the top ten in scream canisters per day. He’s never even tried. 

No. Hannibal is an _artist_, and every scarer on the floor knows it. Middle management knows it, too, which is why he’s received steady pay increases without any corresponding increase in responsibility. Hannibal’s niche has been, and always will be, the tough cases: the children who, despite obvious fear, simply will not scream. 

At least, not until Hannibal is in the room with them. 

“This is a good one, boss.” Frederick Chilton slaps the frame as it lowers down into the cradle, and hands the file over to Hannibal. Chilton is a scrawny, slimy little monster. He has dozens of eyes distributed pretty much evenly over his body, but seemingly only in locations where they either fail to see what they should be seeing, or are placed in the path of every obstacle that the monster can find to hit them on. Hannibal has accepted that having an assistant who spends half his time running around whining “I stubbed my eye!” is simply the price of _also_ having an assistant who, for reasons that are not entirely clear to anyone, always manages to come up with the strangest, most fascinating and challenging doors for his scarer. 

“Kid named Will Graham,” Chilton narrates as Hannibal flicks through the pages. “Eleven years old. Thing is, the actual _fear_ readings are off the charts. Never seen anything like it. If we could just get him to scream, he’d be powering the whole block for a week.” 

“A shy boy,” Hannibal murmurs. He holds the file in his lower set of arms and stretches out the upper set, twisting his serpentine spine around and feeling the joints crackle and pop. 

“Blue,” calls Chilton, starting Hannibal’s warm-up. “Yellow. Paisley. Polka-dot. Invisible. A different paisley. Three different paisleys at once.” Hannibal complies, switching colours effortlessly. Chilton walks around him, admiring the clashing patterns on his head, belly and tail. 

“Gorgeous,” Chilton sighs, and Hannibal rolls his eyes when the assistant isn’t looking. 

The scare floor is chaotic. Most scarers pump themselves up before entering a new door, ready to barge in and tear a scream from some bug-eyed, snot-nosed infant as quickly as they can. Hannibal’s routine is quieter, centering. By the time a door makes its way to him, every enormous, hairy, toothy piece of nightmare fuel that the company employs has already tried their luck with the kid on the other side. The nightmares that Hannibal constructs are subtler and more lasting. He’s the glimpse out of the corner of your eye, the terror in the night when you wake up with the knowledge that you are being _watched_ coursing through your veins like fire. He’s the words whispered in your ear by someone who can’t possibly be there, can’t possibly know you the way they so clearly do. 

Hannibal slithers through the door, and into the dark interior of a musty trailer. 

He looks around. Most scarers will retreat right back to the scare floor if the child lives in close enough quarters to a parent; it’s practically impossible to startle a proper scream out of a kid who can run crying right into the next bed. Hannibal is more judicious; he’s willing to work around the presence of a parent as long as they’re as sound sleeper. 

There is nobody else in the trailer with Will Graham, though. He sleeps on a small cot in the corner of the living room area, while the tiny closed-off bedroom is messy with the detritus of obvious alcoholism, but currently unoccupied. Hannibal has the boy to himself. It’s perfect.

Perfect, that is, until the boy sits up in bed. 

Will Graham has the kind of cherubic face that senior management at the company would probably plaster on some sort of public-service poster reminding employees that even the most innocent-looking children are still deadly. He also has the vaguely unwashed look that only comes from actually being several days without washing, and he looks more _tired_ than any eleven-year old should have a right to.

He tilts his head to the side. Hannibal had entered invisible, and he stays invisible as he slowly advances on Will. The boy’s eyes are wide wide with fear, but it’s an ancient and weary kind of fear, one that was around long before the company put his door into rotation and will be there long after. 

Hannibal is leaning over him, invisible to the eye but threatening in presence, when Will reaches out at the speed of light and places a hand on Hannibal’s face.

Hannibal gasps and shoots backwards. He is not an alarmist, but he is risk-aware. Being a scarer is inherently risky work, and Hannibal has always embraced that risk wholeheartedly. He should go back now and call a 23–19. 

Hannibal doesn’t. He doesn’t because Will is staring at him, and Hannibal realizes that he’s reverted to the three-paisley pattern in his shock. He quickly switches to his preferred default shade of tasteful purple, and he realizes that the place where Will’s hand touched doesn’t burn. His skin isn’t flayed off the bone; he doesn’t feel like his organs are shutting down from the inside. 

And Hannibal stares back, and then suddenly he knows he isn’t going to call a 23–19. Because he can see fear in Will Graham’s eyes, but it’s a kind of fear Hannbal has never seen before. It’s mingled with excitement, and something deep and strong and enticing, and Hannibal can’t leave the human world without tasting this fear. 

Screams are a necessary fact of life; without them, the energy economy of Monstropolis would shut down. But they are a gross, earthly currency. Fear is beyond that, and Hannibal is willing to sacrifice a scream in the service of something higher. 

“Come here,” says Will. “My new nightmare. I want to meet you properly.” 

Following a child’s instructions is definitely not in the employee handbook. But then, Hannibal never had much use for it in the first place. Will is shaking, the force of his terror buffeting his body like gusts of wind, and Hannibal slithers forwards, then extends his neck to enjoy the scent of pure animal fear. Will’s sheets and pyjamas are already soaked with sweat, and he smells good enough to eat. Hannibal _wants_ to eat him, probably would if he weren’t so curious about where this is going. 

The boy is too thin for a human child. His wrist is small and delicate, and Hannibal swivels his eyes around to watch it as Will reaches out his hand again and gently, tremulously, strokes down the scales of Hannibal’s belly. 

He yanks his hand back almost as soon as he touches, the cold slick feeling of the scales evidently too much for him to process. Hannibal grins, wide and sharp, and in an instant he is up on the bed, feeling a strange sense of euphoria. A child touched him, and he is perfectly fine. If human children cannot hurt him, a dizzying world of possibilities has just opened up. Will desperately scoots back, away from him, but there’s nowhere to go besides off the bed, and he is quickly trapped up against the wall by two pairs of Hannibal’s arms. Hannibal flicks his tail up: the very thinnest point, lithe and tentacle-like. Will’s mouth is hanging open in a silent scream, and Hannibal is all too aware that it’s unlikey to turn into a real one, so he presses the tip of his tail against Wills bottom lip. 

Will tries to press his mouth closed, but it’s too late. The tip of the tail pushes in, and when Hannibal finally feels the boy’s lips giving in, a sound rings out in the room. 

Not a scream. Not even a loud enough sound to register on the canister, probably, But it’s a different sound, low and frightened and desperate. 

Hannibal pushes his tail as far into Will’s mouth as it will go, and Will _moans_ around it.

The sensation around Hannibal’s scales is warm and wet, strange but not unpleasant. Surprisingly pleasant, in fact, especially when Will collapses back on the thin mattress and Hannibal and climb completely on top of him, keeping the tip of his tail in the boy’s mouth but allowing all four sets of arms to brace themselves around the scrawny torso. Hannibal teases a little, just to see what will happen; pulls himself out, allowing Will to breathe, and then thrusting back in until he can feel the very tip brush against the back of Will’s throat. 

The sound Will makes at that is louder, maybe even loud enough to register as a small scream, but Hannibal no longer cares. Will is wriggling ineptly beneath him, and Hannibal has the sudden urge to show him how it’s done. He removes the tail from Will’s mouth, pushing himself up a little higher over the boy’s torso, and then curves sinuously down into him. Will’s mouth stays open, either in invitation or in pure shock. When Hannibal’s emerging hemipenes grind down into the bulge in Will’s pyjamas where the human’s torso and legs meet, he can practically feel the shock wave going through the kid. The feeling is like fear but hazier, and it wants _more_, and Hannibal wants to give his kid as much as he can handle. 

Hannibal’s fingers are not quite as advanced as a human’s, but having eight arms has its uses. He disposes of Will’s clothes in a few easy seconds, flicking the t-shirt away with one hand and the pyjama pants with a flourish of his tail. Will’s hands are outright shaking, now, which Hannibal can feel because they’re on his back, now running nervously over the slippery scales and pulling Hannibal down into him, trying to get more of the rhythm and friction that Hannibal had started. 

Hannibal is aware his smile is one of the more disconcerting aspects of his form, and he uses to to full advantage, showing a wide grin that only falters for a moment when one of Will’s hands slips down to feel around inexpertly for Hannibal’s twin hemipenes. The kid bites his lip. 

“Come inside me, nightmare,” he whispers. “I want you to. Just do it, so I know I was right to be scared of the dark.” 

The tip of Hannibal’s tail is still slick from Will’s mouth, and Will’s legs have fallen open from the undulation of Hannibal’s body between them. Hannibal curls his tail around and down and feels at Will’s cock, small but rock-hard, then down until he can tickle at what is clearly the entrance to a human body. Hannibal doesn’t much care what arrangement of parts any given child has; it’s not something he’s ever given much thought to before. But he seems to have located the right place, because Will arches up and says “yes, yes, hurt me, I’ve been waiting for you to for so long,” and when Hannibal pushes the tip in, the sound Will makes reverberates through Hannibal like something electric. It feels like the exact kind of power that Hannibal knows a human child’s cries really do have. 

He wants to hear more of them. Hannibal pushes his tail in farther and uses a few extra arms to flip Will over, giving him access to acres of skin across the kid’s back and rear and legs. A tiny shriek escapes from Will, and Hannibal sees his thin fingers claw for purchase in the sheets. Holding on, holding still. 

“_Good_ boy,” Hannibal purrs, and it’s the first thing he’s ever said out loud to a human but he knows that _this_ extraordinary human is the one who should hear it. 

Hannibal does have claws; short ones, that take some effort to coax out of his fingers, but perfectly serviceable once he gets them stroking up and down the entire posterior side of Will’s body, drawing tiny, oozing tracks of blood. Will is alternately thrusting down into the mattress and back onto Hannibal’s tail, and Hannibal has to strain to hear what he’s panting: “_This is real— nightmares are real— they’re real._”

“Nightmares are real,” Hannibal agrees, “And you’ll know it tomorrow, when you wake up with _this._” He gives a jerk of his claws to draw a slightly deeper cut, and that’s when he feels the boy’s muscles clench around his tail, and Will screams as he thrusts into the pillow one final time, then goes still.

Hannibal withdraws the moment he realizes what’s happened: Will’s full-throated, terrified wail hangs in the air, and Hannibal knows that on the other side of the door, a scream canister is newly charged. 

He should dive back out the door and see for himself the power of Will Graham’s fear, but he lingers. Will is panting into the dirty sheets, his sweet, vulnerable face wet with tears. 

Hesitantly, Hannibal reaches out and extends his tongue to catch one straight from Will’s lashes. Will opens his eyes. 

“Will you be back, my nightmare?” he asks. 

***

On the other side of the door, Chilton claps Hannibal on the shoulder in the exact way Hannibal hates the most. “Another tough nut cracked,” he says triumphantly. “We’ll put this one in the regular rotation.” 

The door lifts off and goes back into storage. The canister joins the hundreds of other screams being produced on the floor, and Will Graham sleeps.


	16. Correspondence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal writes letters, still.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: parasite

As a rule, Will doesn’t snoop. 

There isn’t really any reason for him to. Hannibal doesn’t have any secrets from Will; Will could ask to see any part of him he likes, and Hannibal will happily oblige. Which is why Will knows, when he finds them, that this wasn’t supposed to be a secret. 

Hannibal probably thinks Will already _knew._ Will is standing frozen and mute in front of the small pile of letters on Hannibal’s desk. They’re stamped with stamps Will knows you can’t buy down at the corner store. They’re inside a plastic ziplock bag, and a pair of nitrile gloves are discarded in the trash underneath the desk. 

Will feels like he’s been punched. _He thought I knew. He thought I would be fine with this._

It was, Will would admit to himself if he were less blindly furious, a reasonable assumption. Will is fine with pretty much anything, these days. Hannibal would have no reason to assume that this crosses any line. And Hannibal has, Will realizes while feeling extraordinarily stupid, been doing it for years. Probably his whole life. 

He swallows hard, and pulls on a new set of gloves from the box he knows is in the desk drawer. He has no delusions that he’s going to prevent Hannibal from sending them, so he might as well not contaminate them with evidence that Will Graham is still alive. He pulls them out of the bag and spreads them out on the desk.

They were stacked chronologically i the bag, Will realizes, a rage that he barely recognizes rising in his chest as he pulls out his phone. A quick search confirms his suspicions: Natalino Mele, the addressee of the letter on top of the pile, is the child of an Il Mostro victim. When he was six, he walked two kilometers to a nearby house to get help after finding his mother and her lover dead. Enzo Spalletti is a paramedic who spent three months in jail for Il Mostro’s murders before Hannibal exonerated him with his next victim. The rest are more recent: Tanya Schurr must be Marissa’s mother. Hunter Wharwood, Nathalie Lehman and Devon Gillam are names Will can’t place, but they’re all Maryland addresses; there are any number of victims whose friends and family could be hearing from Hannibal regularly. Allegra Pazzi is of course an address in Florence, and the final letter, at the bottom of the pile, is addressed to Alana Bloom. 

Will feels bile rise in his throat, and it’s at that moment that Hannibal appears in the doorway. 

He must be able to tell that Will is furious, but if he can, he doesn’t show it. Hannibal slides his hands over Will’s shoulders as he passes by and sits down at the desk chair, raising his eyebrows almost imperceptibly at the scatter of the letters. Then he gently grasps Will’s right hand by the wrist and places a soft kiss to his blue-gloved fingertips.

And, of course, making sure that Will would have to change the glove before attempting to open any of the letters. It’s as clear a message as Will can imagine: Hannibal doesn’t want Will to read them, but he won’t prevent it if Will insists. 

“What,” says Will, “on _earth_ do you have to say to—“ he picks up a letter at random with his left hand— “Tanya Schurr?” 

Hannibal look at the letter, impassive. “Shared humanity is the gift that allows all conversation to take place,” he says finally. 

Will throws down the letter on the desk. He shoves them all back in the bag with his one uncontaminated hand, then shucks off the gloves and throws them in the trash. His fingers feel cold and tingling. 

“You’re angry,” says Hannibal, leaning back in the chair and tilting his head slightly. He’s not afraid of Will’s anger, just _interested._ which is even more infuriating.

Will wants to punch him, and he imagines it for a moment; the tiny sliver of shock on Hannibal’s face, and then the proud, satisfied expression from having goaded Will into violence. Their violence has never been… like _that._ Mundane. Ordinary. A man with a bruise on his face that his husband put there in a fit of anger. Will swallows. He isn’t going to do that. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s boring. 

Instead he forces himself back from the edge of the cliff. It feels like an admission when he bites out, “Yes. Yes, I’m angry. Murder and cannibalism are fine, but letter writing is crossing one line too many.” It could sound sarcastic, but Hannibal will realize it isn’t. 

The scalpel that he uses to sharpen pencils was on the desk, and now Hannibal is fiddling with it absently. He usually isn’t the fidgety type, and Will’s eyes are drawn to the small movements of the blade. “Murder and cannibalism are, by definition, a one-time offense,” Hannibal says. “A continuing relationship with my victims…” he trails off, and Will blinks and struggles to recall another time that Hannibal has failed to finish his sentence. Somehow, it eases the knot of anger in his stomach a little.

“You cling to these people like a fucking parasite,” he says, waving his hand at the letters. “It’s… not the best look.”

“Ah.” And now Hannibal looks absolutely _delighted_, which is vaguely sinister on him. “You want to be the only victim that I cling to like a _fucking parasite._”

Will turns away. It’s not exactly true. He’s not _jealous_ of the famlies of Hannibal’s victims, for crying out loud. 

But then, it’s never really mattered what the truth is, when it comes to Hannibal. Will knows himself well enough by now to know that the borders of him erode all too quickly. He’s accepted it. If Hannibal wants to believe that jealousy is the source of his anger, then in a sense, it _is._

So Will allows himself to feel the jealousy, overlaying it on top of the rage and disgust he was already feeling. So that when Hannibal reaches into the bag with his ungloved hand and tosses the letters into the fire in grate, not only the jealousy, but the anger itself slough away like so much dead skin. 

“You did write me one letter,” he admits, and Hannibal’s face lights up from the inside in the way that Will suspects only he can see. 

_We have all found a new life, but our old lives hover in the shadows. Soon enough, I fear Jack Crawford will come knocking. I would encourage you, as a friend, not to step back through the door he holds open. It’s dark on the other side, and madness is waiting._

Will shakes his head. “I was good advice,” he admits, and Hannibal reaches out to place his hands on Will’s hips and pull him closer. “Did you know I wouldn’t follow it? Or were you trying to goad me into doing exactly the opposite of what you said?”

“Neither,” says Hannibal, pulling him close and pressing his head against Will’s belly, nuzzling. “I was being entirely honest.”

Will stares into the fire, where the remains of the letters are blackened and shrivelled. It makes it worse, somehow, that Hannibal could throw them away so easily. That they meant so little. 

He steps away, and pushes Hannibal’s chair to face the desk again. He takes a leaf of paper and a pen out of the drawer, and places them in front of him. 

“Write me another,” says Will.


	17. Stray

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal is on trial, Freddie is on her game, and Will gets a rescue just when he needs it most.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: undead
> 
> This fic= non-explicit Molly/Will.

Will lays his hand on a Bible and promises to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 

He thinks about Hannibal’s God as he says it. The one who drops church roofs on his worshippers, and feels powerful. Wonders if that God will drop a roof on _him._ He imagines Hannibal’s face, lit up with pure delight through a cloud of rubble if the roof of the courthouse were to fall in on Will as he lies with his hand on the Good Book.

Will can promise to tell the truth, or at least the truth as seen by someone with boundaries of self as chronically blurred as his are, which is to say probably _someone’s_ truth, at least. He can also promise to tell nothing but the truth, because he dislikes lying, and he knows Hannibal does too. It shouldn’t matter what Hannibal likes or dislikes, of course, but it does. So he won’t lie.

But the _whole_ truth? Will couldn’t tell that even if he wanted to. Even if he could piece together the story— locate a beginning to is entanglement with Hannbal Lecter that wasn’t his birth, or Hannibal’s birth, or the beginning of the universe, and then an end that isn’t the imagined miasma of blood and sex hovering constantly on the edge of his consciousness— the thought of telling The Whole truth, of laying himself and Hannibal bare in a courtroom, makes him feel hot and half-crazed with possessive anger. Nobody else could ever understand Hannibal. And Will doesn’t _want_ them to. 

So Will stands in the witness box and tells the court how his psychiatrist drove him insane. They can draw their own conclusions on exactly when Will’s insanity started and ended; the important part is that they get the impression that Will was driven insane because Hannibal is insane. On a good day of testimony, the jurors and the public are so convinced of Hannibal’s insanity that Will can feed off of them, allow their certainty to wash over him and feed back into his testimony. 

On a bad day he stutters and can’t figure out where to direct his eyes. There’s only one place they go naturally, and the moment Will allows himself to look at Hannibal, he knows he’s lost. 

Freddie Lounds knows it too, damn her. And she also seems to know exactly how to capture Will in a crowd, after the sessions let out. It’s even starting to seem like the other journalists are starting to give her pride of place; she’s the one who can reliably get a rise out of Will, and thus a better headline for everyone, so she always seems to lead the pack. 

Will had tried to slip out the back today, but there really is no “back” with a trial of this level of sensationalism. Reporters are _everywhere._ And Freddie is standing in front of him, wearing a crisp fall jacket and holding a microphone, looking somehow both terrifying and mischievous at the same time. A crowd of random onlookers has gathered, too. 

Will feels sick. He wishes he _could_ be sick; at least projectile vomiting would probably scatter the crowd a little bit. Though he doubts it would dissuade Freddie. 

“If the jury finds Hannibal Lecter to be nor criminally responsible on the grounds of insanity,” she’s saying, “He will likely spend the rest of his life in the Baltime Hospital for the Criminally Insane— the same facility he sent you to. Would you go visit him, Mr. Graham? For old times’ sake?”

Something in him rebels at the thought of saying _no_, but Will is tired and hungry and feels like he might simply dissolve into a puddle of other people’s emotions right there on the sidewalk and he can’t _think,_ can’t figure out what he should say or do, and that’s when a kindly, slightly frazzled voice breaks through the noise of the crowd and a small hand grabs his and pulls him to the side.

“Honey!” says the voice. “Are you all done for the day? Did you remember to pick up dinner for tonight?”

Will blinks. He feels slightly dizzy. He’s being pulled at a decent running pace through the crowd by the hand. Perhaps he’s being kidnapped. He finds that he doesn’t much mind the idea of being kidnapped at this exact moment, as long as he ends up somewhere far away from Freddie Lounds. 

Bodies and buildings whip past as he follows where he’s being led. It feels rather nice, to not have to think about anything for a moment. No scheming. No questions. No Freddie. No Hannibal. 

When he finally realizes he’s stopped running, he’s standing in a parking lot in front of a blonde woman with a cheerful, plump face. She’s smiling at him somewhat ruefully. 

“Sorry about that,” she says. “You just really looked like you needed an escape route.”

Will blinks. They are alone, and his head is starting to clear. It feels like breathing fresh air for the first time all day. He rubs at the scar on his forehead; he can’t tell if it’s the scar that aches, or his entire head. “I did,” he admits. “Uh— thanks.” 

“No problem,” she says easily. “I don’t usually follow that kind of stuff, but own a shop a few blocks down, and the courthouse is in between work and my parking spot. I’ve seen you getting mobbed a few times now. Everyone wants a piece of you, eh?”

Will winces. The analogy is more accurate than he’d like; he feels like he’s giving bits of himself away, piece by piece, every time he speaks about Hannibal in public. He doesn’t want to think about what it means that those pieces feel precious not because they belong to him, but because they belong to him and _Hannibal._

He doesn’t want to talk about it, but for the first time in a while, he’s standing across from someone that he’s pretty sure doesn’t actually want him to. It feels different from talking to Jack, or Alana. Their concern is invasive, needy. The woman who’s just rescued him genuinely doesn’t seem to care about Hannibal’s trial all that much. 

“Do you actually need dinner?” he says. “I have more food than I could eat in years. Everyone seems to think that the best way of supporting me at the moment is to send over tupperwares full of homemade meals to my hotel room. They think I have traumatic memories associated with cooking, for some reason.”

The woman just stares at him for a moment, then bursts out laughing. She throws her head back and cackles, and Will finds himself grinning a little bit along with her. It feels nice. “I can’t imagine why they’d think that,” she says, and then, “I’m Molly. Do you?”

“Not any more than I have traumatic memories associated with tupperware meals in hotel rooms,” says Will, and Molly has no idea what he’s talking about but she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s jangling her car keys a bit in her hand. 

“Thank you for the offer,” she says. “But I have a son. I have to go pick him up from his baseball practice in a few minutes. I can drop you off somewhere if you need, though.”

“My hotel isn’t far,” says Will, and circles around to the passenger side of the car. He feels oddly light, in a way he hasn’t for years. It’s the feeling of using his gift for something _simple_, he realizes; a human interaction that doesn’t feel like peeling his skin off layer by layer. He doesn’t need superpowered empathy to know that Molly likes him, an easy and straightforward feeling. He wants to keep talking to her. 

He gives her the address of the hotel he stays in when he doesn’t have time to drive back to Wolf Trap in between sessions in the courtroom. There’s dog hair on the passenger seat of the car, and it clings to his uncomfortable dress pants. As she pulls out of the parking lot, he says, “I’m serious about the dinner, by the way. You, uh, don’t have to eat it with me, but I can give you a nice lasagne for you and your boy. Pretty sure someone in the lab made it. It’s an authentic FBI lasagne.” 

“An authentic FBI lasagne,” she says, and now she’s glancing at him sideways in a way that Will recognizes, she’s actually _flirting_ with him, and he feels an answering flutter of nerves and nearly keels over at the realization that he’s not nervous that Molly is going to stab him or fuck with his head or abandon him to rot in jail. He’s nervous in the way _other_ people get nervous when interacting with a potential romantic partner. 

It feels pure. Enticing. He could live here. He _wants_ to. For the first time in years, he’s not thinking about Hannibal. 

“Okay, I admit we were probably going to go to Burger King on the way home,” Molly says. “So I accept, but only if you’ll come eat it with us.”

“Of course,” says Will, and smiles at her. 

“I’m a bit out of town,” Molly warns. “I like my space. Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” says Will. “That’s perfect.”

***

Wally Foster jumps in the backseat of the car with barely a glance for Will, who has now collected a bag of we’re-so-sorry-your-cannibal-psychiatrist-drove-you-crazy sympathy food. “Hi,” he says, and then, “Mom, can I get a hamster? Richard has one.”

“I’ll think about it,” laughs Molly, and then says, “Wally, this is Will. He’s bringing some dinner for us tonight. Will, this is my son Wally.” She grins at Will lopsidedly. “Molly and Wally, I know. We didn’t really think through the whole rhyming thing when we named him Walter.” 

“Not the worst unintentional rhyme I’ve heard recently,” says Will, and thinks that he might actually be in love with Molly when her face clouds with confusion for a few seconds before she finally realizes what rhyme he’s referring to. 

_She doesn’t care,_ he thinks giddily. _She genuinely doesn’t give a shit that I’ve eaten human flesh and carry around hundreds of deadly criminals in my mind._

Molly has a small house on the edge of town, a lot that could be described as suburban but feels more rural than it should have a right to. “We’ve been here ever since Wally’s father died,” she says as she opens the door. Information offered that was not requested, and Will feels the urge to respond in kind. “It’s a little cramped, but it’s good for us for now. I’d love to move to a big house in the country someday.” She takes the container full of lasagne from Will, and leads him into the kitchen. 

It’s small and cramped, but clean; mismatched utensils sit in jars, and old dented pans are lined up along a counter. If there is anything to Will’s colleagues’ conjecture that he has been avoiding kitchens and cooking of late— and Will would not admit that there is— but purely hypothetically, this is exactly the kitchen to make him feel safe. Nothing in here reminds him of Hannibal.

Molly transfers three portions of lasagne to plates and microwaves them, and they sit at a square wooden table in the living area just off of the kitchen. 

“Are you going to have sex with my mom?” Asks Wally, his legs swinging slightly beneath the chair. 

Will manages not to choke on his food, and Molly swats Wally’s arm lightly across the table. “_Honey,_” she says, and then, “Sorry. He’s just at that age.” 

“You can if you want,” says Wally. “This lasagne is better than hers.” 

Will can feel amusement mixed in with Molly’s embarrassment, so he allows the grin fighting its way onto his face to show through a little. He doesn’t say “thanks,” but he’s beginning to suspect she might not find it presumptuous if he did. 

“That’s because it’s got meat in it,” Molly says. “I usually cook vegetarian at home,” she explains to Will, “Not strict about it. This is just a special treat.” 

Will feels a glow of relief he hadn’t realized he was in need of. A vegetarian home. He likes the idea. He suddenly wishes the lasagne didn’t have the meat.

After dinner, when the small kitchen has been cleaned and Wally is off to bed with a book, Will and Molly end up in Molly’s bedroom with the door closed. 

“So you want to have sex, then?” Molly asks with a smile, because she’s the kind of person who can just _ask_ that. 

And Will is the kind of person who doesn’t need to ask that, because he _knows_, and damn it feels good to know something _harmless_ about someone else. 

“Yep,” he says, and pulls her in close, and Molly grins and kisses him. 

And afterwards, when they’re sweaty and sated and a condom is tied in the garbage because normal people do things like keep condoms in the drawer beside the bed, Molly comes back from the bathroom and flops down on the bed like she expects Will to be beside her. 

Will swallows. He wants to. He wants to lie down beside her, close his eyes, let his mind go. 

“C’mon,” she says, patting the sheets. “You’re not going to go, are you? I didn’t take you for the fuck-and-run type.” She’s smiling, though, and Will is almost certain that if he insisted that he needed to go home, she wouldn’t be offended. 

Then he thinks about taking a bus from wherever the hell Molly lives, and sleeping by himself in his salt-crusted hotel sheets. He would probably wank thinking about Hannibal when he got back, because he’s been doing that every night, and he’s not going to stop now. 

Except if he slept here, he _would_ stop. For at least one night. An entire night of not thinking about Hannibal. 

“I… have nightmares,” he says carefully. “I’m not the best bedmate.” 

“It’s fine, I sleep like the dead,” says Molly. 

Will takes a deep breath, and lies down. Molly smiles and throws an arm over him. She’s sweet and solid and _real_, which is an unusual trait in Will’s sleeping partners. 

“I’m more used to sleeping with the undead,” he admits, because he wants to tell her something important. Something secret. Something that even Hannibal doesn’t know: how the dead haunt him, how he wakes up next to them with their big dead vibrant eyes staring into his. How he worries that if it ever stopped, if he ever has a sleep undisturbed by ghosts, he worries that that would be the night that there is no more separation between him and Hannibal. 

Being _haunted_ is the only thing that separates them, any more. 

“The living make better company,” says Molly sleepily. “You’ll get used to it.”


	18. Ripper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will wants to understand the Chesapeake Ripper better, and Hannibal obliges.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Mutation
> 
> Warnings for... basically consensual gore and pretend murder?

It’s _sweet_, is what it is. 

Will is panting, writhing, so hard and sweaty and slick inside with lube that the absence of a cock nearly feels like physical pain. Hannibal is overtop of him, hair dishevelled, eyes wild, lining up his cock with Will’s entrance. Will feels the hot, thick tip of it press against him, and he closes his eyes and readies himself, and then Hannibal whispers, “May I?”

_What an absolutely ridiculous question_, Will thinks. Instead of answering, he grabs Hannibal’s hips and pulls him forward, sliding his hot length home. Will moans, buries his face in Hannibal’s shoulder and nearly screams with it. _May I._ Will’s answer is yes, it’s always yes, Hannibal could take him in a dirty alley or the back of a car or in the middle of a crime-in-progress and it would still be yes. 

It’s only after, when Will has come so hard he’s not sure his legs still work, and Hannibal has collapsed on top of him and seems completely content to squeeze all the air out of him indefinitely, that Will starts to think rationally about it. Starts to reach out with his mind towards Hannibal, and add this new information in to everything he already knows about the man. _May I._ The gentleness sticks out, a puzzle piece that doesn’t slot into place the way it should, a mutation of Will’s profile of Hannibal Will is certain that it will, it _must_ fit, somehow, if only he can find the right way of looking at it. But he needs more information. 

Will remembers cases where the only thing to do was to wait for the killer to strike again, and hope to find it fresh enough that the echoes of the one responsible would still be reverberating widely enough for Will to see them, smell them, taste them. 

He can do better than that, now. 

“Hannibal,” he whispers, his voice a little breathy from the weight pressing in on his lungs. 

Hannibal’s head is pillowed on his chest, and Will feels it more than hears it when he rumbles, “Yes, beloved?”

Will winces. With anyone but Hannibal, he would be asking whether the endearment was in earnest or a joke. With Hannibal, it is always real. 

“I want you to do something for me.” He clears his throat, a little nervously. “To me. I want you to do something to me. Not now. But… later. Whenever you like. When I’m not expecting it.”

“Anything.” He knows Hannibal means it. Of course he does. 

Will opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out. One word in particular. You can’t just _ask_ for that, say it like it’s a word like any other. It feels like the first time Will had said “he’s eating them” out loud. Like crossing some sort of barrier between worlds. 

Hannibal waits. He’s nothing if not patient. Will is starting to feel light-headed from the weight on his front and the compression on his lungs, but he won’t ask Hannibal to move until he says it. 

When he finally forces it out, in the barest of whispers, Hannibal just nods. “Of course,” he says. 

And that is that. 

***

Will had been expecting to have to wait. 

He’d been expecting for Hannibal to bide his time, wait him out. Watch for moments when Will is off his guard, perhaps almost forgotten about the request. But then, perhaps Will’s expectation was obvious. Of course he wouldn’t expect Hannibal to do it the very next day. So of course, that is what Hannibal does. 

They’re getting out of the car after a trip to the market. Will ends up carrying most of their purchases, and when they enter the house he sets them down. 

He remembers bending down. He remembers that Hannibal was behind him. Will wakes up face-down on the bed, naked, face turned carefully to the side, hands bound together behind his back. 

_Huh,_ he thinks. _Drugged. Wasn’t expecting that._ He tests it out, holding it up against what he knows of Hannibal. The Chesapeake Ripper’s victims were never drugged; he was strong enough to take them without chemical aid, and he wanted to. Drugging a victim was an admission that the victim had power; he would never have wanted that. 

_Dammit,_ thinks Will. _The problem is, it’s _me._ It will always be different when it’s me._ Still, perhaps it will be possible to adjust for bias. He blinks, his vision feeling fuzzy and indistinct. Hannibal is sitting on the bed on the opposite side from where Will’s head is turned, but Will is certain he noticed the moment consciousness returned to him. 

He’s proven right when he feels Hannibal’s hand stroke down the back of his leg, from just below his ass to his knee. It’s slightly rougher than he’s used to; appraising. It fails to fully jolt him out of his fuzziness. “You drugged me,” he mumbles. 

“I admit I would have preferred to simply take you by force,” comes Hannibal’s voice, and it’s distant and unconcerned. “However, this was the most expedient method. It does not do to be attached to the means of a thing.”

Will shivers. This is entirely different from the Hannibal who asked _may I,_ who likes to work him open slowly and fuck him slowly and lovingly. Will knows that his own presence has always changed Hannibal’s behaviour, right from the beginning; Will affects him on a quantum level. He has only ever caught glimpses of Hannibal-without-Will at crime scenes, and even then, perhaps Will changes them just by his presence. 

Nobody can ever see how another person is without them, Will acknowledges. But Hannibal, to his credit, is putting in a damn fine effort. He _wants_ to show Will what he’d asked for: Wants to give him as much data as he can, first-hand, about the experiences of the victims of the Chesapeake Ripper. 

“I’m on a bed,” says Will. “I assumed you would prefer a more convenient workspace.”

Hannibal’s hand is on his face in an instant, his large palm covering Will’s mouth and pressing up on his nostrils at the same time to entirely cut off his air. “I prefer them quiet,” says Hannibal. “This can be accomplished with gags, unconsciousness, or premature death. I tend to avoid the latter if I can, as you are aware from your friends in the lab. However, I can provide various other… incentives, shall we say, to convince a living person that it is in their best interest to remain silent.” 

Despite himself, Will feels panic welling up in him as he tries to suck in air and gets only the sensation of Hannibal’s skin against his face. He nods frantically, and Hannibal releases him and steps away. 

“You are on the bed,” he narrates, “Because it is a place of symbolic meaning to you, and to me. I prefer to have a dedicated workspace, true. But it is more important that each element of the kill be _appropriate,_ rather than optimally convenient for me.”

Will swallows. Of course Hannibal isn’t going to treat him like a _random_ kill. He’s going to show how he would kill Will Graham— if he didn’t love him. The thought makes him want to curl up into himself, shrink away from the wrongness of the thought, but he can’t; now Hannibal is forcing him into a sitting position, pressed up with his back against the headboard of the bed, and fastening him to it with long straps that press over his chest and shoulders. His hands are still tied uncomfortably behind his back, and he wonders if Hannibal would untie them, if he asked. He thinks he might; Hannibal feels no contradiction between giving someone comfort, and killing them. 

“This part, you are familiar with.” Hannibal has a scalpel in his hand, and Will is tied down with no give whatsoever. Now is perhaps the time that he should be having second thoughts— and Will is, in fact, terrified. He’s just too curious to allow the terror free reign. 

The tip of the scalpel presses to Will’s forehead, exactly over the existing scar. “You can imagine that this is the bone saw, instead,” murmurs Hannibal, and starts dragging the scalpel across Will’s skin with just enough pressure— Will guesses by the hot-cold flash of pain and the wetness that follows— to break the skin. This time, his isn’t interrupted; he places a gently hand on the top of Will’s head to lean it forward, and the scalpel makes its way over his temple and into his hairline, around the back of his head, and back forward to join in front. A complete ring around his scalp; were the scalpel really the bone saw that Hannibal wants him to imagine it is, Hannibal could now lift the entire top of his scalp off. 

“I wanted to eat it, at one point,” Hannibal muses, his fingers working into Will’s hair and tugging in a way that feels way better than it has any right to. His hands come away red with blood, and he licks casually at one stained finger. Will presses his lips together. He isn’t entirely sure what sound would come out if he allowed them to open, but he knows it would be a reaction to Hannibal’s licking his blood, and not a reaction to the pain of the circular cut on his head. 

“Now,” says Hannibal, “I believe I can make better use of it.” He circles, looking Will up and down critically. Will licks his lips.

“A man with permeable edges,” Hannibal says. “A fluid sense of self. Who carried his mind on the outside of his body. What’s to be done with him?”

Another cut with the scalpel, this one longer and shallower on Will’s arm, just above the elbow. And then screaming, searing pain, pain that blocks out every other thought in his mind, and by the time it stops, Will realizes his voice is hoarse from yelling. 

He gasps, and looks at Hannibal, who is holding a long, thin, bloody strip of the skin that had previously covered Will’s bicep. Will looks away, the adrenaline of the minor skinning retreating and leaving stomach-turning nausea in its wake. 

“I would need more than this, of course,” says Hannibal reasonably. “All of it, ideally. This was just a taste.” Hannibal moves towards him and for a moment Will thinks he’s going to feed Will his own skin, and is preparing himself to bite down on the tough, slimy piece of flesh and probably end up emptying his stomach afterwards, for his trouble. 

He doesn’t. That wouldn’t fit the scene he’s setting up. Will breathes a sigh of relief as Hannibal just places the skin on the bedside table. Will wonders if Hannibal will eat it later. 

“Membraning,” Hannibal mutters, and he’s back with a knife so large that it could run Will all the way through and still be able to get stuck in the wall. “Very important to the finished product. If this mucous membrane is not removed, the brain mixture will be unable to penetrate the skin, and the hide will never soften.”

The knife scrapes down Will’s chest. He winces. It’s not all that painful, not after the ring around his head or the skin peeled off of his arm. It’s definitely _uncomfortable_, though, and the scraping seems to go on forever. Will squirms as Hannibal works the knife over his chest, his thighs, his forearms, leans him forward slightly and scrapes the knife over the back of his neck. It feels awful. It’s interminable. Will has a lot of time to think, so he uses the time to set Hannibal’s intentions in order in his mind. 

Brain-tanning a hide isn’t something Will has ever done before, though he knows of the process: the ancient art of preserving animal hides using the emulsifying agents in brain matter. More importantly, he understands the symbolism. Will’s mind has always seeped out of him, gotten mixed up in places it really shouldn’t. Hannibal’s choice of death for Will memorializes that. The knife scrapes over his feet, and Will struggles away from it uselessly, and feels a small glow of recognition inside him. This _feel_ like a Chesapeake Ripper crime scene. The choice of every element to demonstrate something important about both the victim and the killer. He loves it. He _missed_ this; being an observer, not a participant. 

_Finally_, Hannibal is satisfied with the gasps and squirms he wrung out of Will by “membraning” him. He grabs great handfuls of Will’s skin and _squeezes_, leaving behind living bruises. 

“Wringing the water out of it?” he gasps, and Hannibal backhands him across the face. “Quiet,” he snaps.

And then Hannibal is releasing him from the straps, and laying him out on the bed, because apparently Will is now no more than a stand-in for the idea of his own flayed, wrung-out skin. His head throbs and drips blood onto the sheets, and his arm feels like it’s on fire, but it feels nice to just lay out and way for whatever’s going to happen next. 

What happens next is that Hannibal’s hands are on him again, and they’re gentle and slippery with something that isn’t actually a mixture of blood and water, but Will is perfectly willing to pretend it is. Hannibal is massaging it into him, gently working back and forth across the planes of his chest and down his abdomen and just a tiny bit too hard to be comfortable into his lower belly, and it feels good. 

Will’s accepted that he’ll probably get slapped again for speaking and breaking the illusion of his own death, but he says anyway: “You’re gentle with them, after they’re dead. They’re worth more to you once they stop belonging to themselves and start belonging to you.” 

Hannibal doesn’t slap him; he’s too occupied with massaging brain-liquid into Will’s thigh, and Will sighs in pleasure as he feels the tension start to ease out of him. “My creations are precious to me, certainly,” says Hannibal. 

By the time Will is entirely covered with the stuff— ordinary lotion, he would suspect if he were less high on pain and imagination— he feels far away, like he’s floating above his own body. Like he can see in his mind’s eye the crime scene Hannibal is painting for him: Will Graham, not a scrap of skin left, and tanned hide that used to separate Will from the outside world made waterproof by the strategic use of his own brain matter. 

He barely notices that Hannibal isn’t doing anything any more, just lying beside him, surveying his creation and watching Will think. 

After what seems like an eternity, Hannibal’s hand brushes over the skinned patch on Will’s arm, and the pain brings him back to earth. “Any conclusions?” Hannibal asks. 

Will rolls over, rubs at his eyes. He wants to say that he understands more about the Chesapeake Ripper now, but he doesn’t. As he’d suspected, his own presence had made the experiment impossibly biased. 

There is one thing, though. “You gave me in death what I could never have in life,” he says. “A thick skin. A barrier between me and the world. You made me impermeable.”

“Yes,” says Hannibal. 

“You _love_ me,” says Will, and it isn’t a revelation, but it feels like one. If Hannibal had to kill Will, if he didn’t love him, couldn’t keep him, he would still give him a final gift.

“I do,” says Hannibal, and it feels like safety.


	19. Raccoongazing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every night, Adam watches the raccoons in the park. He hands over control to them, and they hand him Nigel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uhhh theoretically the prompt for this was "alien" but the real prompt was [this tweet.](https://twitter.com/KeeperOfDankniz/status/1182482710222258177)

California is different from New York.

Oh, it’s _fine_. Adam adjusts; it’s the same as New York in a few of the most important ways. It’s even better, in some: he can afford a house now, and his house is near a park.

The park isn’t Central Park, isn’t anything like it; but Adam find he doesn’t actually want it to be, which surprises him. The night sky is darker, and there are fewer people.

And there are still raccoons.

Adam goes out to watch the raccoons almost every night now. He didn’t mean to add that particular step into his routine, but the night air had stayed warmer than he was expecting as fall progressed into winter, and he doesn’t need anything more than a sweater to be comfortable sitting on the park bench and watching them.

Adam’s house is closer to the observatory than the city, and the raccoons are smaller. They’re less likely to be poking around in the park’s trash cans, and more likely to be hiding out in the bushes, where Adam has to wait patiently to catch a glimpse of them. He finds that if he waits long enough, they’ll nearly always reveal themselves. He likes to wait until he sees at least one to go home. As the months go by, he gets used to allowing the raccoons, and not his schedule, to determine when he leaves the park.

It feels like the slow letting out of a tense breath, handing over the control to the whims of the park raccoons. Adam likes his routines; for the most part, he doesn’t _want_ to change them. But ever since his dad died, it felt a little like he didn’t have the option, and he was afraid to try in case it turned out he was trapped. He’d rather not know, if he were.

So he lets the raccoons decide when to show themselves and when to send him home to bed, and breathes a sigh of relief that he is able to. Sometimes, when he goes out with colleagues after work, Adam imagines that they’re all just like the raccoons: temperamental creatures, to whom he can willingly hand over control for a few hours. When he thinks of them as raccoons, it bothers him a little less that they never have set ending times to their dinners or drink outings.

The raccoons are their own particular kind of constant, and so is the man who walks past every night at twenty minutes to eleven.

Well, he isn’t _exactly_ constant.

The first few weeks, he hadn’t even looked at Adam. Adam had noticed him, because he notices everyone in this park; it’s smaller than Central Park, which is nice in a way but also means that every individual person who walks through it takes on a significance and a realness that the people in New York didn’t have. They’re less easy to ignore, now. So Adam notes him, notes how he’s always wearing jeans and a polo with a few of the buttons undone, how he walks slowly like he might be tired but his legs are long enough that he ends up moving quickly anyway.

After a few weeks, the man starts noticing Adam back. Only he doesn’t exactly look _at_ Adam. He squints into the bushes instead, directing his gaze to where Adam is looking, just long enough for Adam to notice him slowing his gait to do it.

Adam guesses that the man is probably wondering what he’s looking at, because that’s what Adam would wonder if their positions were reversed. If he slowed down even more, came to a complete stop and stared at the bushes quietly for a while, he would probably see the rustling, but he doesn’t.

At first Adam likes that he doesn’t, but after a while he starts wishing the man would do something other than slow his pace the tiniest bit and squint. Adam can already see what he’s up to, so it feels almost like being deceived; that the man doesn’t want him to know that he’s curious what Adam is up to.

He isn’t angry about it. Just uncomfortable. He wishes the man would talk to him to make the feeling go away, which is odd. But then, perhaps if he can let the raccoons decide what time Adam goes to bed, he could also let the raccoons decide who he talks to in the park.

Not really. Raccoons can’t decide something like that on their own. But the raccoons put him in the path of a conversation, which is almost the same thing.

Adam doesn’t like symbolism, as a rule. He understands it just fine, which seems to surprise people. But he doesn’t choose to assign it any particular significance that the night the man chooses to simply sit down beside him, is the night the raccoons are being very noisy indeed.

“I leave the park once they’ve shown me what they’re up to for the night,” Adam warns him, because he isn’t going to hang around, one the raccoons have told him to go home, just because there’s another person there for once.

The man squints into the bush, then nods. “Creepy little fuckers,” he says. “Look like bug eyed aliens.” The tip of a masked snout peers out and then retreats.

“They are not,” says Adam, a little hotly. “They’re highly intelligent.”

“Yeah,” says the man, turning to face Adam. His blonde hair is swept back from his face, and he has blueish bruises under his eyes that usually mean someone is very tired, but might also mean they’ve been punched in the face, and Adam isn’t sure which it is. “That’s what I mean. Intelligent. Who ever wanted a tiny intelligent bear that probably could handle itself with a set of lockpicks and a knife? I always get the impression that they’re going to break into my house and hold me up in the night.”

Adam frowns. He doesn’t mind that the man sat down, but this conversation is rapidly getting away from him. “I don’t think that’s likely to happen,” he offers, feeling somewhat lame. Like this bizarre conversation was a test he’d just failed.

Instead, the man’s face breaks into a smile. It’s wide and unambiguous, not the kind that makes you wonder if they’re lying and only smiling because they want something, but the kind that makes you sure it’s real. “Oh,” he says. “That’s okay, then. Thank you for telling me. I’m Nigel, by the way.” 

“I’m Adam. You’re welcome,” says Adam, and it’s that moment that the raccoons roll out of the bushes, looking more like they’re fighting than anything. 

“They can squeeze into very small spaces,” says Adam, because offering information is what he _does_, and he feels the need to defend the creatures from the ridiculous spectacle they’re making in of themselves. They’ve managed to arrange themselves into a more conventional mating position now, the male behind the female with his furry paws fastened around her belly, thrusting. 

He doesn’t _want_ to think about what that would feel like as a human, having someone hold you fast as they pound into you. But he’s thinking about it anyway, because Adam has never been all that good at avoiding inconvenient thoughts. 

“Is that so,” says Nigel, and he leans back on the bench, his arm resting casually on the backrest. “Well, the human anus can stretch up to 7 inches without being damaged. So that must mean we could all fit almost two raccoons inside of us.”

Adam just stares. He tries to imagine someone stretching their anus to accommodate a raccoon, or multiple raccoons, and fails rather thoroughly. And Nigel is looking at him strangely, like they haven’t just met, like Adam is supposed to say something that isn’t about raccoons. 

“Are you…” he searches for the phrase he’d heard Nina in Accounting use. “...coming on to me?”

Nigel grins. “Does raccoon sex get you hot, darling?”

California is different from New York. In New York, Adam would never have allowed a bunch of park animals to help dictate his schedule. In New York, he would never have sex with a strange man from the park.

But the raccoons are in charge, in California. And the raccoons have given him Nigel, tonight. 

“Yes,” he says. “It’s time for me to go home, now that I’ve seen them. Are you coming with me?”


	20. Gemini

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In his eagerness to be with Adam, Nigel runs afoul of a powerful creature.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: curse, and that's actually what the fic is about. Besides that, uh... there is no earthly explanation for this.

“You sure do know a shit ton about stars, sweetheart.”

Adam’s throat clenches. He always hates when Nigel swears, because Adam can never quite tell if it means Nigel is angry at him or not. Nigel has assured him that if he’s angry, Adam will know. Adam had tried to insist that that’s the whole point, that Adam _won’t_ know, but Nigel had just laughed and kissed his neck, which turned out to be an extremely effective distraction. 

Now he turns to try to see Nigel in the dark on their park bench, and he says “I’m sorry, I’m talking too much, I shouldn’t monopolize the conver—” and is cut off by Nigel’s soft lips pressing on his, stubble rubbing across his cheeks.

“Never apologize, darling,” he murmurs. “I could listen to you talk about the stars until the end of time.” To prove his point, he shoos away the raccoon that is working up the courage to approach them. “Piss off, nosy fucker,” he mutters, and Adam giggles. “_Nigel!_”

“Next constellation,” Nigel prompts him. “One of the astrology ones, isn’t it, darling?”

Adam winces at that, and then points. “Gemini,” he says firmly. “The two brightest starts are Castor and Pollux— the twins. Except they weren’t actually twins in Greek mythology, they were half-brothers. Only Pollux was immortal, and he gifted half his immortality to his brother. So they alternate between Olympus and Hades.” 

Adam leans into Nigel’s arm, which has snaked around his shoulders. The chastened raccoon hisses at them slightly before disappearing back into the bushes, but Adam is too happy and comfortable to care. 

“So they never get to see each other?” says Nigel. “Kind of a tragic way to live, isn’t it?”

Adam frowns. He’d never had a brother that he could imagine missing. He missed his dad, when he died, but only because he was sad that he’d died. If his dad had still been alive, just somewhere else, and would have been okay. 

The only person Adam can imagine missing just because they’re in another place is Nigel. 

“I guess so,” he says. “Can we go home now? We saw a raccoon, and I’d like to have sex.” 

Nigel grins, showing sharp canines. “Of course, darling.” 

Nigel and Adam head towards home. 

And in the bushes, a spurned creature of the night is listening, and a dark and vengeful magic rises up to follow them. 

***

Adam wakes up warm and comfortable, with the musk of fur thick in his nose. 

It’s tickling his nose, actually, the fur is. He frowns and tries to blow some air out of his nostrils to get whatever is tickling him off of his face. 

It doesn’t work. Adam doesn’t want to open his eyes, doesn’t want to give up the warm weight in his arms. He tightens his grip a bit, and wakes up very quickly indeed when he is met with a high-pitched yowl and a white-hot flash of pain down his chest. 

He rolls to the side, hurtling himself straight out of bed and only barely catching himself with his feet before being dumped on the ground. He gasps and clutches at his chest, to find four thin trails of blood making their way down his bare skin. 

On the other side of the bed, the raccoon regards him warily. 

Adam is not in the habit of swearing. He uses language like he uses everything else: habitually, with the patterns of his speech ingrained from years of practice. 

Maybe Nigel is rubbing off on him, though. Because all Adam can think to say when he pokes his head through the door and realizes that Nigel is nowhere to be found, and glances back at the raccoon cowering on his bed, is “What the fuck?”

The raccoon stares at him. Adam is no good at reading human expressions, but animal expressions tend to be more obvious and less nuanced. The raccoon’s head is ducked, its eyes wide and fearful, its entire posture one of fear and submission. Adam approaches it carefully, holding out a hand. “Okay,” he says, because he’s read that talking to plants helps them grow so surely talking to animals must be soothing to them even if they can’t understand the words being said, “Let’s put you back outside, where you belong.” 

And then the thing cowers back, shrinking against the headboard, and fucking _shakes its head._ Side-to-side, the gesture impossibly clear and human. 

Adam stops, because he isn’t entirely sure that he wants to wrestle with an angry raccoon. “How did you even get in here?” he asks, stalling for time more than anything. The window is latched tight, and anyway they’re on the second floor with no convenient tree or even a nearby drainpipe for an intrepid climber to get up on. And Adam had woken up _cuddling_ with the thing, for fuck’s sake. 

And then the animal starts walking towards him, hesitantly, reaching out a paw. 

Animals and humans share many gestures, Adam knows. Humans are animals themselves, just apes with overgrown brains and needlessly complicated social structures. So despite the fact that it doesn’t make any sense, and he’s probably going to get rabies, Adam reaches his hand out towards the raccoon. The raccoon inches towards him, shuffling forward on his hind legs to extend both paws, until the animal cradles the tips of Adam’s fingers ever so gently between his sharp claws. 

The raccoon turns Adam’s hand over, and snuffles his nose to the back of it, like a kiss. 

“_Nigel_?”

***

They adapt. 

Nigel is warm and affectionate and clever. So long as he bathes regularly, Adam loves burying his nose in Nigel’s fur and holding him tight, discovers that he actually sleeps better with Nigel’s small furry body pressed to his chest than he did with his large human one. He buys big whiteboards, and Nigel’s claws work just fine to hold a pen and write on them. Nigel sits on the table and picks pieces of mac n cheese off of Adam’s plate while he eats. Eventually he asks for a bowl of water, and starts washing the cheese off before he eats each noodle. 

Adam realizes that most people would probably be concerned that he had a boyfriend who is now a raccoon. Adam keeps meaning to think about it properly, eventually, to really sort out all the tangled threads of confusion and emotion in his mind. But Nigel is just as good at distracting him from his own spiraling thoughts in this form as he was before; ever time Adam starts wondering just what’s going on, or if he’s actually just gone completely crazy, Nigel is there pawing at his thighs and snuffling into his neck and swiping his warm rough tongue over Adam’s cheek. 

They don’t have sex, but Adam thinks maybe they will. He’s not sure how to ask Nigel for it, or what he would be asking for. But when Adam palms his own cock under the covers in the night, Nigel just curls into him more forcefully, licking up his neck and under his ear and beside his eyes, and Adam wonders if that’s its own kind of sex. 

So it’s working well. It’s fine. Adam is happy, and Nigel even seems pretty content, as far as Adam can tell, under the circumstances. 

Until one morning— a morning, Adam completely failed to notice on his nightly expedition with Nigel to the park, directly after a full moon— Adam wakes up with his hands pressed to Nigels’ chest and feeling every single hair on his smooth, human skin. 

“What?” Nigel murmurs, and it sound strange, not exactly higher than it should but more like Adam can suddenly hear the constant thrum of much lower sounds than he’s used to. He opens his eyes, and it’s like looking through a filter with most of the colours turned off. 

“Oh, _shit,_” says Nigel. He’s looking down at his own body— all pale skin and gangly limbs— and then over at Adam, who is—

—of course he is. 

“Oh, _darling,_” says Nigel, not missing a beat, and Adam finds his small, furry body scooped up and boxed in on Nigel’s lap. His paws are exquisitely sensitive, almost to the point of overloading his brain but not quite, and he retracts his claws as much as he can to stroke down Nigel’s legs, feeling Nigel as he’s supposed to be. 

And if _Adam_ is no longer quite as he’s supposed to be, well, it’s only fair that he take his turn. Nigel’s big human hands are stroking roughly down his back, and it feels good. Adam feels a little bit like crying, but he arches up into Nigel’s touch and lets himself be soothed. 

They settle back into their routines eventually. Adam learns to work the whiteboard pen. They go to the park in the evenings, and Nigel lies on the ground with Adam on his belly on top of him to watch the stars, and people eventually stop staring at the man beside the bushes with the raccoon on his chest. Nigel makes him mac n cheese and Adam tries washing it, because for some reason in this body he just _wants_ to, but eventually decides that it does taste a lot better with the cheese intact. 

And when, almost a month after Adam had taken his turn, he wakes up in a human body again with Nigel back to raccoon form, he isn’t even surprised. 

“You were right,” he says to Nigel that evening in the park. He’s lying on the ground, though Nigel is mostly sitting in his chest to watch Adam instead of the stars. “About Castor and Pollux. It is a tragic way to live.” 

Nigel licks his cheek, and it doesn’t matter that Adam can’t tell whether it’s in agreement or comfort. 

They’re together. It’s not enough, but it’s forever, and Adam will make do.


	21. Exorcism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal is fairly sure that Will is a demon. He doesn't mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: demon. 
> 
> Happy election day, this is what I had the energy for after *waves hand vaguely at Canada* that.

Every time, Hannibal wonders if it will happen. He both hopes for it, and is relieved when it doesn’t. 

Will has him tied to a frame, this time. Will built the frame himself, which seems like it ought to make the ritual stronger, if this is a ritual. Hannibal is fairly sure it’s a ritual. It cannot feel so much like being laid bare and protected, like descent and ascent at the same time, if it did not have some significance beyond the mundane world. 

In the mundane world, Will hits him. 

At first Will just hit him with his hand. Hannibal asked for more, and Will provided. Paddles, belts, canes, whips. Hannibal doesn’t look at them. If it’s going to work, he needs to remove himself, allow it to happen to him. You can’t really participate in your own exorcism. 

Then again, traditionally a demon can’t exorcise _himself_ from the soul of the possessed, either. But if Will is a demon, he is surely one strong enough that no other power could rid Hannibal of him. 

Will strikes him again, and Hannibal slumps forward in his restraints and leaves his body. He has no idea how long it goes on for. He is vaguely aware that he could stop it if he wished— Will was very clear about that— but he no longer remembers how. 

When they’re done, Hannibal’s love for Will Graham is still intact. He can feel it inside him, beating like a second heart. 

He knows it can’t have originated from him. Hannibal does not have the capacity for something so pure it nearly burns him every time he grazes the edges of it with his mind. So it must have been external; this force that made him upend his life, spend years in jail just to remain alive in the memory of one man. It must have come from Will. 

If Will is a demon, Hannibal no longer cares. He gives himself, and waits for Will to take it all.


	22. Research Grant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why did a demon on a deadline need so badly to watch Will and Hannibal fuck?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt? Uh, the prompt was "haunted," which this fic has nothing to do with, except in the sense that I am constantly haunted by [Hope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/)'s creativity and brilliance, and told her that if she wrote demon Nigel forcing Will and Hannibal to bang yesterday, I would explain why today. So, voilà, a highly GO-influenced <strike>spacedogs</strike> heavendogs sequel to [getting you off is my new favorite hobby](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21132449).

It had started out innocently enough. Or rather, it had started out with purely evil intentions, which for Nigel is the same thing. He’d just meant to corrupt the kid a little, get one over on the man upstairs. 

He hadn’t counted on having _emotions_.

It was all the fault of the budget cuts, really. Nigel understood the reasoning for the move to the new office building, he did. Tough times, belt-tightening all around, and it only makes sense to pool resources. It’s convenient to share an office building with Heaven, and under normal circumstances, the demons who work on the lower floors and the angels who work on the upper should never have cause to meet. As long as nobody gets off the elevator at the wrong floor, everything should go just fine. 

It only took about a week before things started to break down. A broken refrigerator in Hell’s break room led some demons to sneak up to Heaven’s to steal some space. Back-room negotiations over the souls of human politicians spilled out into the open, ending with drunken after-work commiserations about how difficult it is to get anyone down on earth to do what they’re told any more. Neither side really has working computers, but each is convinced the other’s technology would solve all their problems if only they could get a hold of it. 

So when Nigel had spotted the sweet little angel sheepishly making his way out of the staff washroom on Nigel’s floor, he’d just grinned and said, “Careful, a pretty thing like you could get stuck down here.”

And the angel blushed scarlet in a way Nigel was certain extended down beneath his billowy white robes, and said defensively, “You have better toilet paper here.” 

Nigel stepped in close and grinned with every fang in his mouth and said “Nothing but the best for angelic bottoms, hmm?” and the angel scurried away back Upstairs, and that _should_ have been the end of it. 

They really shouldn’t have kept running into each other. Adam— really original naming practices Up There, Nigel had scoffed when he learned the kid’s name— shouldn’t have kept using Hell’s employee washrooms, as well as their cafeteria and firey-pit observatory. Nigel probably shouldn’t have taken to wandering around the upper floors in the hopes of catchings glimpses of big green eyes and gently rustling wings. 

They probably shouldn’t have started meeting on purpose, in the stairwell in between floor -1 and the ground level. They shouldn’t have started touching each other, feeling the way their opposing essences spark at the slightest brush of fingers. And they _definitely_ shouldn’t be sitting side-by-side on Adam’s bed in the small apartment assigned to a relatively low-ranking Power. 

Adam’s eyes are wide. “You could have gotten in trouble. Couldn’t you? I mean, your side still doesn’t really let you…”

Nigel runs his hand down the side of Adam’s face, just to feel the shivery spark of heavenly power radiating off of him. “Shh,” he murmurs. “Don’t worry about it. I just classified it as a temptation. Most of the time, they don’t really check up on whether the humans were already Tempted before you got there.”

Adam licks his lips, his gaze stuttering down Nigel’s face, and Nigel wonders what the angel feels when Nigel touches him. Wonders if the hellfire inside of Nigel feels as good against Adam’s skin as the heavenly light inside of Adam feels to Nigel: intense, nearly pain but not quite, demanding _more._

Nigel’s mind is half in the room with Adam, and half back at the home of the humans he’d chosen for research purposes. How the small pretty one had flushed when the cannibal had said _you are lovely beyond words._ He wants to say something like that to Adam, wants to see how the angel would react, but every time he opens his mouth, words fail him. He doesn’t feel _worthy_ of even pointing out Adam’s loveliness. Adam must already know that he is perfect, and Nigel is Fallen. 

“Did they show you how to do it properly? The human way?” Adam asks, and Nigel finally gives in to his desire to take the kid’s face in between both his hand and angle it upwards, towards Nigel’s face. 

“Sure did,” he whispers, and he doesn’t mind that Adam’s eyes don’t meet his, because Adam’s eyes are fixed on Nigel’s mouth, and that is all the permission he needs. “We start out with our lips,” he says, and presses their mouths together. 

Adam’s lips feel almost unbearable against his, unbearably soft and warm and and unbearably _good_, and Adam makes a tiny squeak of surprise at the feeling. He almost pulls away for a moment, overwhelmed, then presses back in and twines his arms around Nigel, shuffling sideways to be facing him properly. 

Nigel is shocked when the wetness of Adam’s tongue probes gently into his mouth. It tastes light and sweet and Nigel meets it with his own, sliding the slick lengths of muscle against each other, and he can’t resist tugging at Adam’s torso so that the angel ends up seated in his lap, legs splayed on either side of Nigel’s thighs, the feathers of his wings quivering slightly in the air behind him. 

“Where did you get that idea, gorgeous?” Nigel gasps, because he’s pretty damn sure he hadn’t told Adam to thrust his tongue into his mouth. Adam pulls back, looking slightly sheepish, keeping his arms hooked around Nigel’s neck. “I don’t know,” he admits, “I just thought of it. Do you think humans do it that way?”

“Yeah, I think they fucking do, darling,” says Nigel, pulling Adam’s mouth back to his. “Do I taste like brimstone?”

Adam giggles against Nigel’s lips, a tiny vibration that ricochets through his entire body. “A little,” he admits. “But I like it.” 

“_Fuck,_” Nigel growls, and lifts himself up just enough to turn them around and push Adam back onto the bed. He gives Adam enough time to get his wings out from under him, spreading the iridescent feathers out to the side. They’re nearly large enough to hang off the sides of the bed, and Nigel eyes them. He could manifest wings too, if he wanted, but they might be unwieldy for what he has planned. 

“Humans took their clothes off slowly,” Nigel mutters. “Fuck that.” He snaps his fingers, and his suit and Adam’s robes are folded neatly on a chair in the corner of the room. 

“Nigel!” Adam protests. “We said we were going to do it properly!” 

“We can do the next bit properly,” Nigel promises, smoothing his hand down Adam’s abdomen and over the join between his legs. “We gotta manifest something here, sweetheart. Now, the humans I visited had penses, which is kind of a long—”

“I know what penises are, Nigel,” interrupts Adam, rolling his eyes. “I’ve made plenty of them. If that’s what your humans had, that’s what we’ll use.” 

Nigel blinks and nearly jumps at the fact of his hand now resting on Adam’s half-hard cock. Demons are more likely than angels to walk around with genitalia, but Nigel had never really seen the point in the dangly kind, especially if you regularly go out looking for physical violence, so he quickly equips himself with one to match.

“There,” he says, and dips to kiss Adam again. They get lost in that for a little bit, until Adam arches up against him and says, “What next?”

Nigel licks his lips. He remembers what had happened next _very_ clearly; the way the smaller human had moaned like he was actually dying as the larger one licked up and down the seam of his ass. Having greeted quite a few of the cannibal’s dispatches at the gates of Hell, Nigel isn’t at all certain why any mortal would let that particular man’s teeth near their flesh _anywhere_, let alone their reproductive system— but then, that isn’t really any of the demon’s concern. 

When he hauls Adam’s legs apart and dives down between them, Adam raises himself up on his arms curiously. Nigel isn’t exactly watching him closely any more, but he can see enough to notice that Adam’s eyes don’t dart around any more, they’re laser-focussed on what Nigel is doing. He pushes his nose into Adam’s newly-created balls, smelling the ozone scent of a fresh miracle that hangs around them, and laps over his perineum. 

Adam tilts his head to the side quizzically. 

Nigel goes lower, summoning more saliva to ease his path down the crack and over Adam’s hole. After a few moments of enthusiastic licking and sucking, he glances back up again. 

Adam is frowning in vague puzzlement. 

“Darling,” says Nigel, “did you forget to make your ass an erogenous zone?” 

Adam looks sheepish. “I didn’t know it was supposed to be,” he says. “I remembered about the penis. It feels very nice when you touch it. I can— er, I can fix it?”

Nigel has already hauled himself up, his chest pressing to Adam’s. “No need,” he reassures him. “You’re perfect as you are, okay?” he leans down, and his elbow brushes against Adam’s wings spread out on the bed, and Adam gasps. 

Nigel pauses. He leans over, runs his fingers through the feathers, and Adam’s eyes go wide as a punched-out little “_oh!_” escapes him. 

Nigel grins, and braces his knees on either side of Adam’s belly. “_So,_ he says, you didn’t know your ass was supposed to feel good, but you remembered about the wings, eh?”

“They feel nice when I fly,” gasps Adam, and writhes as Nigel spreads his hands as wide as they can go and pats forcefully outwards from root to tip on each wing. “But I didn’t know they could feel— feel like _this_—”

Nigel bends his head, licking along a line of feathers. The sensation is vaguely dry and sticky, and they taste somewhat of dust, but the way Adam thrusts his brand-new cock up into Nigel’s, like he’s absolutely _desperate_, makes it worth it. Nigel repeats the motion, trying to make the feathers soffy with his saliva, and before long Adam is gasping “Nigel? Nigel? Is there… something else the humans did?”

“Yeah,” says Nigel, and he grinds his bare ass down on Adam’s erection. “Yeah, there fucking is. Give me a moment, baby, this takes some preparation. 

Nigel, conveniently, has not forgotten that the anus is supposed to be an erogenous zone. And anyway, he remembers how the smaller human had said _yeah, it fucking hurts_ when the cannibal had entered him, and even though the human had seemed to enjoy it, Nigel doesn’t want that for Adam. Corrupting an angel is fair game, but _hurting_ him— no, Nigel can’t bring himself to do that. 

He has a vial of oil, because fancy human-made silicone-based lube is nowhere to be found either in Heaven or Hell. Nigel reaches back and slicks himself up, while managing to simultaneously run a slick hand up and down Adam’s cock. 

“You ready to be inside me, sweetheart?” he grunts, and Adam nods. “Of course,” he says demurely. “Angels come inside people all the time.” 

It takes Nigel a moment to realize that his sweet proper literal-minded angel is making a _joke_, and he has to put it aside because the feeling of sinking down on Adam’s cock takes precedence over everything else. Adam’s cock inside him feels exactly the way Adam’s fingers feel on his skin— tingly, slightly painful, achingly sweet with the half-forgotten memory of everything that is lost when a demon Falls. Being touched by Adam makes him want to simultaneously beg for forgiveness and swear vengeance on Heaven, and now that touch is everywhere, it’s _inside_ him, setting his thighs and belly and heart on fire. 

“_Adam,_” he breathes, and leans forward to brace himself on his arms. The humans hadn’t done it quite this way, their places are reversed, but Nigel no longer cares. He’s certain that he’s got the hand on this now, or at least if he’s doing it wrong, he no longer has any interest in learning to do it right. Adam is panting “_yes— yes— Nigel_—“ and Nigel would do absolutely anything to keep those sounds going as long as possible. 

“Adam. Jesus, you feel so good.” Nigel watches the angel’s face for a sign that he objects to the blasphemy, but apparently taking the Lord’s name in vain _within the actual gates of Heaven_ is less important than the sensation Adam is experiencing right now, and the rapture on Adam’s face is what pushes Nigel over the edge, spilling seed over Adam’s belly and chest. Adam’s eyes go wide looking at it, and a moment later Nigel knows why as Adam follows him: he has no idea whether the stuff would have any Earthly reproductive function, but it burns inside of him in a way that he wants to capture in amber and keep forever. 

Nigel pants, trying to catch his breath despite not technically needing to breathe. He needs to breathe on a _spiritual_ level, though, which is really what matters here. 

His head is drooping onto Adam’s chest, and it takes him a moment to realize that the sensation tickling his back is Adam’s wings, which he has raised from the bed to wrap around Nigel like a cocoon. 

It feels like the closest thing to being an angel since Nigel really was one. And that was a _very_ long time ago. 

He swallows. “Are you… okay, angel?” he says. “You’re not going to…” his throat tightens. He hadn’t really thought all that much about it, before. Figured if something bad happened to the angel, well, he’s a demon, and Tempting is part of his portfolio. Causing an angel to Fall would be a feather in his cap. 

Now, Nigel can’t stand the idea of Adam being any less pure and good than he is. Can barely even remember a time when the angel wasn’t the most important thing in his own personal universe. 

“I’m wonderful,” says Adam, and Nigel believes him. Adam probably couldn’t lie even if he wanted to. 

“I think I should go do some research, too,” says Adam dreamily, and his feathers rustle as they stroke gently down Nigel’s back. “Next time, I’d like to try with vaginas.” 

Nigel splutters. “Didn’t know angels were allowed to tempt people to sin,” he says. 

“It’s called an _ecstasy_ when _we_ do it,” says Adam primly. 

“Of course.” Nigel laughs and buries his face in Adam’s chest. “Do whatever research you want. I’ll be here to test it out with you.”

“Good.”


	23. Prepper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alana knows what's coming, and she needs to be ready. She needs _them_ to be ready.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "deal." Alana and Hannibal have one, and she hasn't forgotten it. 
> 
> Basically the next in my "everyone Hannibal and Will ever touched go batshit eventually" series.

Margot chooses Australia, and Alana doesn’t think to ask why until they’re on the plane. There wasn’t time, really, and anyway she doesn’t particularly care. 

She does ask, unconcernedly, as soon as Morgan dozes off under the influence of a dose of tylenol. Margot just shrugs and says, “It’s the predominantly English-speaking country with the highest rate of vegetarianism.”

“Ah.” Alana nods, then twines her fingers with Margot’s. “Okay.”

The choice should be Margot’s, anyway. Margot is the one who’ll have to stay there. She’s the one who’ll have to call the police and report her wife missing even though she knows there isn’t a chance in hell of her being found alive. She’s the one who’ll have to raise a son on her own. Alana has no illusions about her ability to prevent these things from happening; all she can do is prepare for the future. Or rather, prepare Margot and Morgan for it. 

***

“Alana, we don’t need to _do_ this. We’re millionaires, jesus. They have private chefs in Australia too, you know.” 

Alana makes a frustrated noise. She’s standing by the oven, a new convection oven/gas range that she’d ordered to replace the old electric unit the moment they’d closed on their house near the beach a few hours south of Perth. Her hands are covered in fish juice, raw egg and bread crumbs, and Margot is standing in the doorway, looking alarmingly perfect. 

“You don’t hire a fucking _private chef_ to make fish sticks for your five-year-old, Margot!” Alana feels like crying. First there’s Morgan’s picky eating— normal in a young child, Alana knows, but frustrating nonetheless. Then there’s Margot’s prissy insistence on not doing any of the cooking and cleaning. Alana didn’t grow up poor, but her family certainly wasn’t wealthy enough for her to see the staff of hired help that Margot insists on to be anything but an embarrassing level of luxury. 

The cleaners, she doesn’t mind. Normal people hire cleaning help, sometimes. Yard work, too, she can outsource without too much guilt. And a driver just made good sense, at least until Alana fully grasps the habit of driving on the left side of the road. 

A chef, though. They’d had a chef back home in Baltimore, but that was— before. 

Before Alana knew that she only has so much time with them. Before she knew that she needed to _prepare_ them. 

And there is no way that Alana Bloom is going to leave her widow relying on a goddamn private chef to feed their child. If she’s learned nothing else from Hannibal, she knows that feeding is _important._ If she can just teach Margot to cook, if Morgan can have memories of Alana’s food even after she’s gone, then maybe she won’t have completely failed. 

Apparently she’s making the fish sticks that Morgan demanded by herself tonight, though. Margot rolls her eyes, turns on her heels and stomps up the stairs. 

“_Fuck,_” says Alana, and Morgan appears in the doorway, watching her with big eyes. 

She ignores him. She needs to prepare. 

***

She gets a chest freezer. 

There’s plenty of room in the basement. She fills the freezer with food, prepared meals and frozen soups and cuts of meat that Morgan likes and Margot won’t touch. 

She gets bookshelves, and fills them. Picture books on the lowest shelves, teen fare slightly higher, all of her own favourites on top. She wonders if Morgan will make the connection, that Alana left this for him. To introduce him to her after she’s gone. 

Sometimes Margot appears on the staircase, as she’s working. She doesn’t comment, any more. Mostly Margot leaves her alone. 

Margot doesn’t need to understand. Alana will make the sacrifice of allowing Margot to be angry at her, if that’s what it takes. She loves her enough for that. 

She writes letters. She puts them in a box, labelled with dates to be opened. Birthdays, milestones. She’s peripherally aware that it’s maudlin, and possibly traumatizing, but she can’t stop herself. 

She needs to do _something_ to fill the time before she disappears. 

***

“Need some help with that?”

She can hear Margot frigging herself under the covers, can feel the bed shaking. Usually she ignores it. They haven’t touched each other since they arrived in Australia. Since Alana started Preparing. 

But she needs to try. She can’t live like this, loving and loving and spending every minute of the day preparing, trying to take care of someone she’s barely even holding on to. 

Margot’s movement stills, and Alana can see her biting her lip in the dim light of the bedroom. 

Then she says viciously, “No, I don’t think you should. Better to teach me to be _self-sufficient._ So when you’re kidnapped and tortured and killed, like you’re clearly convinced you’re going to be, I don’t have to figure out how to do it on my own. Better to just give up now.” 

Alana swallows, rolls over, faces the wall away from Margot. She cannot explain that there is no element of _giving up._ Holding out or giving up does not matter, when it comes to Hannibal. There is only the deal she made, and the inevitability of its reckoning. 

Margot should know that. 

The movements on the other side of the bed are no longer squirms of pleasure, but suppressed sobs. Alana closes her eyes, She can’t sleep, any more. But she can do the same thing in the darkness that she does during the day: wait. 

***

By the time Hannibal comes for her, Alana will be ready. 

She will leave a freezer full of food, a bookshelf full of books, notes and photos and hard drives and journals and newspaper clippings, obsessively categorized. Margot and Morgan don’t look at her collections, her preparations. They mostly keep away from her. But they _will_ look at them; Alana is certain that once she’s gone, they’ll appreciate what she did for them.

By the time Hannibal comes for her, Alana will have nothing left to miss.


	24. How to Cook a Wolf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Despite the excess on his table, Hannibal Lecter does not waste food.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: alternate dimensions
> 
> [Title](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/250693.How_to_Cook_a_Wolf)

Will has cooked with Hannibal before. 

He’s minced herbs, tenderized meat, stirred pots of sauce and soup and pasta. He’s chopped ginger. 

He’s never cooked _with_ Hannibal before, though. Not the way Hannibal cooks— day in and day out, the next meal percolating in the back of his mind long before it’s simmering on the stove. 

It seems so antithetical to Hannibal’s entire persona of indulgence and excess that it had actually taken Will quite a while to notice that the rate of food waste in the Lecter kitchen is essentially zero. Bones and vegetable trimmings go in the backyard composter only once they have been used for stock, offered to Will to evaluate for canine suitability, or both. Every other scrap of food that is prepared for dinner is, after the feast, carefully packed in glass containers, and then either frozen or refrigerated, according to a logic that Will cannot quite discern. 

Will has never ventured into the kitchen for what happens next. It feels almost like a private ritual; Hannibal frequently asks him to help with dinner, and seems to take pleasure in Will’s company, but he has never asked for help with breakfast or lunch. Usually, Hannibal cooks breakfast while Will showers, and sets up lunch while Will is occupied with home improvements or hunting research. 

It’s a division of labour that should feel slightly odd, like having a very dangerous maid, but it doesn’t. It feels like maybe something goes on in the kitchen before the morning and afternoon meals, some alternate dimension of Hannibal's psyche, that is even more sacred than what goes on before the evening meal. Will feels vaguely nervous when he thinks about interrupting it. 

He recognizes the signature of their leftovers, of course; mixed in with scrambled eggs, puréed into soup, sliced into sandwich fixings. He’s aware, on a peripheral level, that it must take effort, perhaps an entire file system in the memory palace, to keep track of which ingredients can be used in which dishes and on what time frame. 

Will just appears in the dining room when Hannibal tells him to, and eats. He lets Hannibal watch him eating, lets him tell stories of where he learned the recipes and whom he’s served them to. Lets Hannibal run his hands over Will’s belly, slightly better-padded than it used to be, and knows that Hannibal is claiming ownership. Knows that Hannibal can, and very possibly does, decide exactly how many calories he wants Will to eat in a day, and make sure that he does. He seems to like Will on the fluffier side of lean, so that’s how Will stays. He would let Hannibal do anything to him; feeding him is hardly an imposition. 

He gets echoes. 

He can’t help it. Probing into Hannibal’s mind is too much a part of him now; he wouldn’t be able to turn off his questing empathy if he tried. As Hannibal surveys the luxurious spread of dinner, more food than the two of them could ever eat in one sitting, Will can feel his satisfaction, but also his relief. It’s jarring, once he picks up on it; that Hannibal could still, now, _worry_ about food. That every meal brought to the table represents just one more day of staving of the wolf of hunger. That perhaps the wolf is still at the door. 

Perhaps he will always be. Once Will can sense the wolf, prowling around the fences at the perimeter of the memory palace, he can no longer ignore him. He’s there in the way that dinner is disguised every time it shows up cooked into breakfast, like Hannibal is preparing for a potential future when remnants can no longer be disguised so elegantly. He’s there in the thin slices of lunch meat, in the way supplies of food are always extravagant but portions are always small, a taste of each part of the meal before moving on to another course. 

The wolf is there in the way Will can— only when he can’t help himself— tug on the thread of Hannibal’s memories, walking backwards through time. How instead of the man he loves and loathes and fears and worships, Will’s meal is served by a thin boy, one who stumbles through communist propaganda in a language not his own and wonders if he’ll feel as hungry tomorrow as he feels today. 

Will blinks, and the boy disappears. It’s only him and Hannibal, constructing sandwiches on homemade bread and lettuce from the garden and cold cuts from last night’s entrée. 

Will heaps the meat on a thick slice of bread. They will not go hungry, either of them, not again. “It looks wonderful,” he murmurs, because Hannibal likes compliments no matter how many times he’s heard them. “Thank you.”


	25. Passes-Dangereuses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Me and JF and Marie, we know the wendigo is real, but we’re not scared of it like the grownups. Because we’ve met it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: folk horror
> 
> So I was thinking about how one of my favourite things about the Hannibal post-fall concept is that they can believably end up anywhere. Between places mentioned on the show, places we know Will or Hannibal have emotional ties to, places suggested by geography, and destinations that reference book canon... the entire world is covered. 
> 
> So for this prompt I was thinking about how Eastern Canada and the Great Lakes is the homeland of the Wendigo myth, and also that I just plain old want to write some Hannigram in Canada, specifically about places I miss, because hey, you can DO that. Soooo my nanowrimo project might end up being something along those lines. 
> 
> This is not that project, it's just kind of... a small random exploration of Hannigram doing their thing in the frozen wilderness in a way that is maybe creepy but also super fluffy.

Pèpere tells me that we are lucky to live in the most beautiful place on the Earth. 

Passes-Dangereuses was only named that ten years ago. Back when I was busy being born, and a bunch of other people were busy dying on the river. So they figured they’d just name the whole place Dangerous. To be like, hey, look out, it’s dangerous here. You know? 

Anyway, the river is dangerous, but everyone knows that’s not actually what the place is named for. There’s stuff here more dangerous than the river. Jean-François says so, and he is thirteen, and old, and knows what he’s talking about. 

And anyway, it’s not just JF. And it’s not just kids, either. The grownups talk about the wendigo too. They’re scared of it, because they know it’s real. 

Me and JF and Marie, we know the wendigo is real, but we’re not scared of it like the grownups. Because we’ve met it. Pèpere knows the wendigo is real too, but he thinks we’re making up that we met it. 

It’s actually just a him, the wendigo. He speaks French in a funny way that still works well enough to ask you if you’d like some jam on your scone, or another sausage. JF says he’ll eat you if you’re rude, so we say _oui, merci_ really fancy, like pretending we’re from France. He seems to like that. 

You can’t actually remember where his house is, to go over there on purpose. Because of the magic, I guess. You can only find him if maybe like it's winter, and you’re playing hockey on the lake at just the right time, or like maybe you go looking for a new pond to try out that might have better ice, and then there’s a man with a scar all across his face who’s ice-fishing, sometimes, and he says “jesus, you guys look freezing,” and he’ll take you back to him. 

Marie wants to be a goalie in the NHL, so we’re usually taking shots on her when the man with the scar finds us. 

The grownups don’t believe we’re really having snacks with the wendigo, but if it’s not him, how do you explain that I told him once how Mr. Blanchet at the corner store ripped off Pèpere, and the next day Mr. Blanchet moved away? Or how do you explain how Marie told him how Stéphane kicked her off the shinny rink for being a girl, and Stéphane moved away too?

How do you explain that, _hein_?


	26. a man with a freak on his back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will has a nightmare about Hannibal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: possessed

Will wakes gasping in the night, and Hannibal’s arms are around him even before he’s fully conscious. 

Not all of his nightmares are high drama and mystical creatures and metaphors so obscure he’s not even sure where his own brain gets them. Sometimes Will dreams that the universe is just slightly tilted, Only one parallel universe over, one flap of a butterfly’s wings. 

That doesn’t mean they’re any better. “_Fuck_,” he mutters, breaking Hannibal’s rip to sit up and gasp in a few heaving breaths. “Fuck.” 

Hannibal waits, his fingers steal up under the hem of Will’s damp t-shirt to rub soothingly over his back. 

If Will were pressed- though there is nobody left alive to press him on this particular subject— he would admit that he likes this part. Craves it, even looks forward to it a little; the nightmares are going to happen anyway, after all, so it’s fine for him to look forward to what comes after. 

His breathing slows, and his skin stops tingling enough for him to actually feel the warmth of Hannibal’s hand against his back. Will hums, letting Hannibal feel the rumble of his chest through his ribs. Letting him know that it helps, having him there. It helps to have physical comfort, when for so many years he went without. And it helps to know that Hannibal is waiting. Expectant. Excited, even. 

It helps to know that Hannibal _loves_ this part. Will doesn’t mind knowing that Hannibal looks forward to his nightmares. It soothes him to know that this is _for_ something, it’s not just empty suffering. 

Suffering for Hannibal’s sake is never empty. 

Will sighs and lies back, and Hannibal rolls onto his side, not minding Will’s salty, clammy skin as he throws a leg over Will’s thighs and nuzzles into his neck. Then he glances up, waiting for Will to speak.

“I was Reba McClane,” Will says, and Hannibal’s eyes brighten. “Well, not exactly. I was still me, and the serial killer who loved me obsessively was still you.”

He lets Hannibal digest it, small pieces at a time. He’s curious how Hannibal will interpret it with bits of information missing, anyway. 

“You felt for me the way you recall her feeling for Francis Dolarhyde?” Hannibal guesses. 

“No,” says Will. “She wasn’t in love with him, not really. She could have been, but she wasn’t yet.” Hannibal takes that in, and Will feels the rise and fall of his own belly. The weight of Hannibal’s hand resting over his scar, reassuring. 

“In the hospital,” says Will, “after he tried to kill her, I told her that she didn’t draw a freak. She drew a man with a freak on his back.”

Hannibal pushes up on his elbow, staring into Will’s face with an intensity that Will allows but does not reciprocate. He’s tired, and Hannibal can have this, but he’ll have to help take it. “You believe that the Dragon was separate from Dolarhyde, the man?” asks Hannibal. “That the man could have thrown off the monster, given the correct resources?” 

Will nods. He _does_ believe it; he’s seen plenty of people who contain a darkness that will never overtake them. Who are possessed by a demon, but do not become the demon.They can be perfectly functional. Will had believed it when he told Reba that Francis could have been one of them, and he still believes it now. 

“In the dream,” says Will slowly, “I, too, drew a man with a _freak_ on his back.” He winces; he hadn’t liked the word when Reba used it, and he still doesn’t like it now. But perhaps it is an accurate word for what Hannibal is. 

What he _is._ Not what he carries on his back. 

Hannibal rolls over, pinning Will beneath his body weight, and Will lets it happen. He closes his eyes, allowing the comfort of helplessness to overtake him. 

“Did I try to fight it, in your dream?” Hannibal asks. “Did I deny myself, visit psychiatrists and confess my darkest desires in the hopes of expelling them? Did I attend twelve-step programs? Did I quit, over and over again, only to come crawling back to the darkness I was saddled with unwillingly?”

Will nods. His eyes are squeezed shut, and he is almost surprised to realize there are tears leaking from the sides of them. 

Will is beginning to feel the exhausted hollowed-out feeling that means the nightmare is truly over and he’ll be able to sleep for a few more fitful hours. 

The nightmare where Hannibal was a _normal_ psychopath. Will still feels a cold clench in the pit of his stomach when he thinks about it, so he tries not to. Instead he opens his eyes to stare at the real version, Hannibal’s face very close to his. His unrepentant, unconflicted, fiercely joyful face. The face of a monster, not the monster’s victim. 

Hannibal understands the dream, Will knows. He reaches his hand down and smooths it over Will’s cheek, his forehead. “I’m not going anywhere, my love,” he whispers. 

Will closes his eyes and rolls onto his side. “Hold me,” he says, and the monster does.


	27. quarter tones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will Graham builds a harpsichord.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're confused about what this would even sound like, [do I have a mindfuck for you!](https://youtu.be/tDroa5WTU34?t=241) The prompt was "gothic," which... I feel like kind of fits into the sound landscape of this? Ornate and excessive, full of must and decay. IDK, that's just a post-hoc justification, I just suddenly remembered my love of [microtonal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtonal_music) keyboard music and wanted Hannibal to have an instrument for it.

The cabin is perfect. 

It is mind-bogglingly, almost unbelievably perfect, as if it had been assembled from bits and pieces of Will’s wildest fantasies. The ones that involve Hannibal all mixed in with the ones that involve retreating into the forest with a pack of dogs. The idea that he can have _both_ seems like it must be some sort of trap. 

It isn’t, though. And Hannibal seems genuinely happy here; for the most part they spend their time recovering (and cuddling, and fucking, and wondering how on earth they had spent so long inhabiting the same planet without pressing their bare skin together) and once they are well enough, they hunt. Animals, for now, but with the understanding that this is practice. 

It’s enjoyable practice. They grow stronger; they have almost everything they had in their old lives, or at least everything of importance. 

Almost. 

Will knows Hannibal isn’t going to ask for anything more than what he has. Certainly not when it comes to material objects; they have a small town about half an hour away, but there’s nothing for sale there that Hannibal would consider worth owning, that they don’t already have. 

But Will knows he misses it. And what’s more, _Will_ misses it, if it’s possible to miss something he never really had. He’s imagined it, though. Sitting on the couch as Hannibal composes, or waking up to scale exercises. Hannibal must play scales, Will figures; Will is no musical genius, but he knows it’s impossible to get good if you don’t practice; therefore, Hannibal must at one point have practised. 

Will wants to hear him. 

He considers the theramin. It would be simpler to build, especially for someone who’s more mechanic than woodworker. Circuits, antennae, oscillators. Probably parts he could pick up at the old radio shop in town. It’s tempting.

He doesn’t want to. Or rather, perhaps he does, but it feels like the wrong order, something out of line. He imagines the sound of the theramin, sinuous, no boundaries in between notes. A million possible pitches— more than that— literally _infinite_ possible pitches, at your fingertips. Hovering in the air. Potential waiting to become reality. 

It’s too much, too soon. It feels like it could crush the fragile new thing blooming between them. 

And yet there is something too _simple_ about the idea of a harpsichord. A replica— as far as Will will be able to make one— of a Baroque instrument with no variation in volume, no fade on the notes, just sound or the absence of it. It’s the kind of instrument that Will would have assigned to Hannibal years ago, but now he knows better. He can see into the cracks. He wants to _hear_ the cracks, too. 

Well. Will figures that surely, that must be possible. Perhaps if her knew the slightest thing about making harpsichords, he would balk at the idea, but fortunately, he does not. 

He figures getting wood is probably the first step. 

There’s no internet at the cabin— it’s not like there’s anyone they want to contact, anyway— but Will looks up articles on the computer at the tiny public library in town. Everyone’s eyes slide right off the man with scars on his face and muddy boots, and he prints of sheafs of research. 

Will spends several days outside evaluating wood, and ends up spending several days just chopping and then dragging home the largest specimens of black spruce he can find. Hannibal starts raising his eyebrows as Will begins chopping and drying the stuff; he tries boiling it in lye to speed up the process, which Hannibal watches with interest. 

“Go away,” says Will good-naturedly, and Hannibal does. The back room of the house becomes his workshop. He ends up spending as much time poring over equations as he does working with the wood itself: calculating and re-calculating the strength of wooden elements needed to support string tension, then re-adjusting for an entirely different set of strings. Part of him wants to ask Hannibal for help with the math, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t even know if Hannibal is any good at math, really; after all, he never had managed to reverse time. 

He hums snatches of tunes from his childhood while making jacks, fantasizes about Hannibal’s fingers dancing over the wood as he carves keys. He isn’t sure exactly how long it takes before he has to go into town to buy a tuner, because time has little meaning at the cabin; daytime is the time he works, and evening is the time he touches Hannibal. Perhaps it’s months; perhaps it’s years. 

It doesn’t matter how much time it is, because one day the work is done, and Hannibal appears, as if by magic, in the workshop. Like he knows he’s been summoned; or perhaps it’s the same sixth sense that seems to find Will in the kitchen at the exact moment that Hannibal is about to plate dinner. The knowledge that a body of work has been completed. 

Hannibal stands in the doorway, like he’s waiting to be invited in. Will places a chair in front of the harpsichord, and waves his hand. 

Hannibal enters the room, but doesn’t sit. He is scrutinizing it, and Will’s heart thumps. He has no idea, really, what a harpsichord is supposed to look or sound like; nothing but reams of information printed off from the library. Half of it is ancient treatises only dubiously translated from German. He bites his lip. 

“Many traditional instruments have multiple keyboard consoles,” he comments. “But I think, Will, that yours is not a traditional instrument.” 

“Yours,” Will corrects, “Yours is not a traditional instrument. The bottom keyboard is a traditionally tuned keyboard. The upper contains the quarter-tonal notes in between each set of lower keys.”

“You have expanded the universe,” says Hannibal, “but not infinitely. You have precisely doubled it.” 

“There are two of us,” is all Will can think of to say. 

“Fitting into the cracks of each other. Both more and less than the sum of our parts.” Hannibal finally sits. His hands hover over the lower keyboard, then the upper.

“I admit,” he says, “I will have to… acclimate. Absorb an entirely new set of pitches into my musical consciousness." 

“I know,” says Will. “I want you to. I want to hear you.” 

Hannibal sets his hands on the keys, and plays.


	28. Comeuppance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal ate something he shouldn't have. What else is new.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: disease/contagion

Thank God the house has two bathrooms. 

Will stands outside of the en-suite, debating whether or not to knock. On one hand, he’s starting to get genuinely worried. On the other hand, he doesn’t really want to go in. 

“Hannibal?”

“I will be fine, Will,” comes the strained response. Not a lie— not _I am fine_— but somewhat reassuring nonetheless. 

Good. So WIll can be awful guilt-free, and he plans on it. 

“You’re an idiot,” he offers, and wanders off to the kitchen. He’s hungry, and he suspects he won’t be getting breakfast made for him any time soon. 

It’s not exactly difficult to guess what caused it. Despite all theories to the contrary, Hannibal Lecter’s stomach is (as far as Will can tell) made out of ordinary human stuff. They’d been kneeling over the dead body of a man who’d pursued Will after a single glance of him on the street— an oaf with a knack for stalking and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of shitty flower bouquets. He was, however distasteful, sincere. 

After enough time had passed that they’d both ceased to find it funny, Hannibal had stepped in front of the man and calmly informed him that he was going to eat his heart. Will was hardly surprised by that. It’s just that he didn’t really expect Hannibal to do it _at the crime scene._

Will stayed fairly serene as he watched Hannibal root around in the man’s abdomen for prizes, and then reach his hand in and dig the heart out— standard fare. He was slightly less serene as Hannibal raised the heart to his mouth and tore a chunk out of it, his hands dripping with the gore of the heart combined with the man’s ripped-up guts. 

Will grimaced, and Hannibal just grinned, licking his lips lasciviously as blood ran down his chin. He hadn’t managed to tear a particularly large chunk out of the heart, but he’d gotten a few fibres, which he chewed and swallowed with relish. 

It turns out, though, that using your hands as utensils directly after ripping a man’s intestines out with them is the murderous equivalent of wiping back to front. And now Hannibal is holed up in the en-suite bathroom, expelling fluids and solids from every orifice, and Will is cooking himself an omelette and whistling. 

He eats it on the bed, so that he can shout through the door to Hannibal, and because he knows Hannibal will be able to smell it and be irritated about WIll eating in the bedroom. He’ll probably be irritated that Will hasn’t included a protein source in the omelette, too. Will grins and settles into the mattress, leaning back against the headboard and placing his coffee mug on the bedside table and his plate on his lap. 

“He probably had a virulent strain of E. coli living in his gut,” Will supplies at an appropriate gap in Hannibal’s retching and moaning. “You got it on your hands when you pulled the intestines out, then in your mouth when you ate the heart.” It makes it even better to know that Hannibal already knows all of that, probably knew it from the first twinge in his stomach, but he can’t even muster up the energy to say so. 

He shoves a few more bites of omelette in his face, and considers whether Hannibal is in enough pain to warrant being nice to him for a moment. There probably isn’t enough pain in the world, if Will is being honest with himself, at least as long as it’s not life-threatening. 

“Need some Gatorade?” he offers anyway, and that actually produces a weak but emphatic “No, _thank_ you” from the other side of the bathroom door. 

“Were you trying to get me _horny?_” Will continues scathingly. He takes a sip of coffee and listens to the sounds of Hannibal rinsing his mouth out at the sink in a moment of respite. “With that heart trick?”

Wrong move. “You did let me fuck you over the body,” Hannibal points out. 

Which is a good point. “Right,” Will admits. “But I have to say, any horniness I experienced is pretty much being retroactively erased, right now. And that gimmick isn’t going to work twice.” 

It’s not like Hannibal _needs_ a gimmick to convince Will to fuck over dead bodies, but it’s the thought that counts. 

Will finishes his breakfast, and deliberately leaves the dirty plate on the covers to spread its rich, eggy scent through the bedroom all morning. 

“Enjoy the wages of sin,” he calls. “I’m taking the dogs out.” 

He’s fairly sure Hannibal croaks out “I love you too,” but he can’t be sure.


	29. give us this day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will and Hannibal both make bread.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, the Great Bread Wars of 2019. In which the calm waters of my friendship with [Hope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture) were rocked by the revelation that, while we both personally use breadmakers and agree that Will Graham does too, the question of whether or not Hannibal Lecter consents to allow bread from a _machine_ to pass his lips can only be resolved by pistols at dawn. That, or a [public](https://twitter.com/lovetincture/status/1189356196668555265) twitter [feud](https://twitter.com/teiandcookies/status/1189357207378202624). Or some fanfiction. So settle in with a beverage and slice of your bread of choice: here's my version, and you can go read hers here: [Break This Bread](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21236393).
> 
> Oh, and the prompt was "cult." Yes, breadmakers are a cult, and so are Sourdough People. Trust me, I'm both.

After the cliff, after the shock of the water and the shock of each other, after messy bloodied mouths crashing into each other and whispered promises and rising from the ocean like something new, like God took one look at them and spat them back out into the land of the living, after all that— 

— Hannibal insisted on going back to the cliffside cabin to get a fucking mason jar full of slime. 

The fucking slime— okay, _sourdough starter_, the maintenance of which had apparently been part of Chiyoh’s mandate during Hannibal's incarceration— that is currently sitting on their kitchen counter. And which Will is seriously contemplating taking outside, and putting a match inside the jar, and blowing on the flames until it’s a black crispy sooty jar full of ashes, which Hannibal will find and probably do something terrible to Will over, but it will be fucking worth it because that is what Hannibal deserves for, very possibly, loving something else on Earth better than Will Graham. 

Will knows that isn’t true. He knows he isn’t being fair. Hannibal does love him more than the starter. Not _all that much_ more, though. 

So, he doesn’t burn it. Instead he drives to the thrift store in town, the one that’s always full of shelves upon shelves of ancient electronics that nobody could possibly want— VCR players, George Foreman grills (he’s not quite _that_ angry with Hannibal), curling irons, electric mixers, and— ah yes. 

Will smiles, really rather sincerely, when he sets eyes on his prize. Molly had used one, he remembers. Well, “used” is maybe not a strong enough term. _Devoted to,_ perhaps. Maybe even _worshipped._ Which, really, is only logical. Bread is the staff of life, the sole human necessity, a gift from God. It’s only logical to treat a machine capable of providing infinite bread like a God. 

And Hannibal is nothing of not weirdly, almost creepily theistic. So it’s perfect. 

Hannibal is going to fucking _kill_ him. 

Will is maybe 70% sure he means that thought metaphorically. The other 30% he can categorize as a certain spirit of adventure. He sets up the bread machine on the counter beside the sink. 

Hannibal ignores it. 

Hannibal— will realized pretty much the instant they attempted actual, physical cohabitation for the first time—spends a considerable amount of time on the dance of creating foods that require small amounts of active labour, but large amounts of time. The bread is one of them; Hannibal has a routine for making bread that takes up most of the day. 

It’s not time-consuming, but it’s precise, and begins the night before with a larger than usual quantity of flour being added to the gooey mass of living wild yeast kept in the jar on the counter. The next morning, Hannibal carefully spoons a small amount of starter into a glass of water, to check that it floats. Then he adds ever more flour and water— only ever those two ingredients— and enters into a sort of complicated timed dance for the entire rest of the day. Every so often, he folds the dough over precisely four times, then leaves it resting in its bowl. Towards the end of the day the dough makes its way into baskets— real fucking different from being in bowls, Will assumes— and finally into two large Dutch ovens to be baked into—

—well. It’s not that Will actually _wants_ to stop eating Hannibal’s bread. He really, really doesn’t. Actually, he could probably eat nothing but Hannibal’s bread for the rest of his life, and remain perfectly content and— some deep, almost Biblical part of him insists— probably entirely healthy. 

But it’s the principle of the thing. And now that Will has purchased the bread maker, he finds himself oddly attached to it. It takes him some time to work up the courage to actually use it, but when he finally does, he doesn’t need to look up the recipe. He remembers perfectly well what Molly had put in: water and oil on the bottom, then flour, sugar, and salt, then finally a small indentation with yeast on top. He doesn’t really know why you need to make an indentation to pour the yeast into, when it’s all about to get mixed around anyway. He does it because Molly did it, and somehow doing it her way feels a tiny bit like honouring her. 

Will’s never made bread before by any method, so he presses the button on the machine and watches the paddle start mixing up the ingredients with something akin to pride. It makes no sense— he’s not doing anything, especially not compared to Hannibal’s method— but somehow there’s still a satisfaction in providing bread for one’s self.

It reminds him of Molly. It’s impossible for it to not remind him of Molly, and although that clenches something slightly nauseous in his gut, he still finds that he likes it. Like maybe if he honours her with this, the way he treated her might not matter so much. 

The machine beeps three hours later, while Hannibal is in the kitchen preparing lunch; vegetables and cuts of meat for sandwiches. Perfect. 

Will half-expects a fight. He expects Hannibal to stop him from pulling the hot pan out of the machine, shaking the odd, too-tall loaf out and placing it on a cutting board on the table. He expects raised eyebrows or snide words, something akin to the time a Snickers bar wrapper had fallen out of the back pocket of Will’s pants in the wash. 

Instead Hannibal stands behind his habitual chair after setting the platter of fixings on the table, staring at the loaf of bread with the aloof, distant expression that means he is thinking very hard indeed. 

Then, he goes into the kitchen and fetches a knife. 

A bread knife. It’s a bread knife, Will notes with relief when Hannibal carries it to the table, though he supposes it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility that Hannibal would stab him with a bread knife in retribution for a bread-related offense. He doesn’t, though; he simply places it on the cutting board beside the loaf of thick, boring, oddly-shaped white bread. He sits down at his chair, and stares straight ahead. 

Will swallows. He’d expected to feel victorious, if he really did get Hannibal to eat bread that isn’t his own ridiculously perfect artisanal sourdough. But he doesn’t. He feels like he’s drowning in loss and pain, and it takes him a moment to realize that the feeling is Hannibal’s. 

“Thank you for making bread, Will,” says Hannibal, and it actually feels like being stabbed with the blunt end of a bread knife. 

Will wants to shrug it off, wants to be able to casually pick up the knife and cut off a slice of bread and eat it, because it’s just fucking _bread_, it shouldn’t matter. But then, it had mattered to Will to buy the bread maker. 

_In the walls of our hearts and brains, danger waits,_ Hannibal had said once. _There are holes in the floor of the mind._ Will feels like he’s just stepped through one, in Hannibal’s mind palace; like the floorboard beneath his feet had rotted entirely away, and now he’s freefalling into a cellar so deep he’s not sure he’ll ever even hit the ground. 

Will wants to revert to habit, just find the loose ends of emotion and circumstance and tug on them until the situation unravels. Like Hannibal is one of his own crime scenes. But he hesitates, because this feels… old. Hannibal’s emotions feel older than him, somehow, and instead, Will takes a play from Hannibal’s own book. 

Intimacy for intimacy. 

“Molly used a breadmaker,” he says. “We went through about a loaf a day, between the three of us, so she’d put in the ingredients every night before bed, and we’d wake up to a new loaf in the morning.”

“Do you miss her?” asks Hannibal. His face is unreadable, or perhaps Will has just stopped trying to read it. He’s looking inward instead. 

“Sometimes,” he says slowly. “Not so much miss as— remember. I just remember her, is all.” Will picks up the load of bread, turns it over in his hands, as Hannibal watches. It feels like he remembers, smells like he remembers. 

He sets it off to the side, on the bare table, leaving the cutting board and knife sitting empty. _What do you remember?_ It asks. 

If Hannibal can see the gambit, he doesn’t seem to mind it. It’s his own method, after all. Share, be honest, make complicit. 

Hannibal rises, and when he returns to the table, it’s with both a loaf of his own bread, and the jar of starter. He hands the jar to Will. 

“A hammer will last forever,” says Hannibal, “But every so often you must replace the handle, and every so often you must replace the head.” He gestures to the jar. “If you accept that you remain in possession of the same hammer, then you could say that this collection of wild yeast have been providing my family with sustenance for two hundred years.” 

Will lifts the jar to his nose. It’s pungent but in a way that smells somehow fresh, and shot through with bubbles small enough to look almost frothy. It’s an invitation, Will knows: _look. See me._

Cautiously, Will dips a finger in and lifts it to his tongue. The stuff isn’t bad, sour but not in a way that rings alarm bells in the vestigial mind. Hannibal doesn’t seem to mind him sticking his finger in a family heirloom. 

Will sets it down on the table. He closes his eyes. It occurs to him that he’s never really felt like he’s _humbled_ himself in Hannibal’s presence before; even when his mind was burning up, even when he was behind bars, even when he was batting his eyelashes and saying _please_, there was always an undercurrent of electricity between them that denoted a game, albeit the most serious game of either of their lives. 

Now, Will feels humbled; not before Hannibal, but before the weight of what Hannibal himself is humbled before. “May I have a piece of bread?” He asks, and Hannibal silently cuts him a slice off of the sourdough loaf. 

This is familiar territory; feeling the impressions of objects, working his way back from the evidence in his hands. Will bites into the bread, the taste strong and bracing. 

“This belongs to your family,” he says. “Your past. You would put plasma in beer and blood in pudding and meat in every dish that can survive it, but you would never put anything but flour, water and salt in this. This predates you. You said once that nothing happened to you; you happened. But it wasn’t quite true, was it?” Will takes another bite of the bread, ancient and heavy with meaning. “_This_ happened.”

Hannibal cuts a slice for himself, and starts assembling an open-faced sandwich from the ingredients in front of him. Bread from an ancient castle in Lithuania, tomatoes from their garden, meat from their hunt.

He gestures to the other loaf. “There is room for two loaves of bread on our table,” he says, and something Will hadn’t realized was coiled tightly inside of him suddenly comes loose. He wants to laugh, wants to cry and touch Hannibal’s face, wants to tell him that it’s all okay now, they’re safe. That Will wants him. 

Will pushes the breadmaker loaf away. It felt good to make it, but in the act of _eating_, he cannot resist giving this gift to Hannibal. Eating to _know_, learning the parts of the memory palace that Hannibal himself fears to tread with every bite. “You can make French toast with it for breakfast tomorrow,” Will decides, and reaches forward to cut another slice of Hannibal’s bread.


	30. The Invitation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock finds someone he'd like to invite him for dinner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: crossover, yeahhhhhh

Sherlock Holmes, John would have to admit, is not generally known for his adherence to social structures and traditions. 

This, though, is beyond the pale. 

“I beg your pardon?” The stranger that the detective has just accosted is tall and broad, and speaks English with a slight lilting accent that John can’t quite place. At the moment Sherlock had approached him, he had been purchasing drinks for himself and another man who, in the surroundings of the lobby of the Royal Ballet, looks like nothing so much as a barely-contained feral animal. 

John has the weird urge to gesture at the smaller man’s face and say _cheers, mate— at least I can keep mine under my shirt,_ but he doesn’t. 

“You heard me perfectly well the first time, and you are merely buying yourself time to come to a decision as to your answer,” Sherlock says impatiently. “So, for the second time: my name is Sherlock Holmes, I’m a consulting detective, and I would like for you to invite me to dinner.” 

“Perceptive,” says the man contemplatively, and John bites back a laugh. He tilts his head, vaguely reptilian, and something about the gesture is so off-putting that John resolves that when he has _words_ with Sherlock about this, as he most certainly will, they will be about both his methods of acquiring dinner invitations, _and_ the specimens from whom he solicits them.

“Very well,” decides the man, and John is far past the point of being surprised that one of Sherlock’s weird, seemingly-random whims paid off. “Hand me your mobile, please, and I will give you an address. We are somewhat outside the city; I hope you don’t mind.” 

“Not at all,” says Sherlock, and hands over the mobile. The man types something into it, and says, “I will see you at 7:30 tomorrow evening,” in a tone that brooks no argument. 

“You will,” agrees Sherlock, and that’s that. 

*** 

“You’re not _serious_ about this,” says Will. 

Hannibal, of course, is entirely serious, and Will is perfectly aware of it. He’s been perfectly aware ever since preparations for dinner started, immediately after breakfast: bones in a pot for a fresh batch of stock, brains in several successive batches of water to soak, mincemeat and pastry dough chilling in the refrigerator. 

Will taps his fingers nervously against his legs as he watches Hannibal stirring some sort of grain on the stove. “So how are we doing this?” he says. 

“We are doing this,” says Hannibal, “By having a perfectly pleasant meal with two fascinating specimens of British celebrity.” He holds out the spoon. “Stir, please.” 

“Yeah, I looked up their blog,” says Will. “They’re fucking famous. People are going to notice when they go missing, Hannibal. This is a terrible idea.” But he’s already given in; Will is already sporting a knife in the hidden pocket up his sleeve and a thigh holster with a small pistol. 

“Nobody is going to notice,” says Hannibal. He pours oil into a pan, carefully lining up the pieces of brain dredged in egg and flour. “Because Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are not going to disappear.” 

Will glares at him out of the corner of his eye. If Hannibal doesn’t want to tell Will what he’s up to, then Will can’t force him. It’s just _irritating_ to be forced to improvise, when he shouldn’t have to. But if Hannibal wants to enjoy watching Will think on his feet, fine. Will can kill two nosy detectives just as well with no pre-planning. He’s perfectly willing to if it’s what Hannibal wants. 

***

Sherlock rings the bell at 7:30 exactly, after spending several minutes staring intently into the front hedge of the house. 

“Do you even know these peoples’ names?” It occurs to John to ask, just as the door swings open. 

“If he didn’t before, he does now,” says the man on the other side. It’s the one with the scars on his face, who looks slightly exasperated. “I’m Will. Hannibal is in the kitchen. Come on in.” He holds the door open with a raised eyebrow, like he half-suspects they’re not going to cross the threshold after all. 

Sherlock does, but then he stops and stares intently at Will. “You didn’t tell him you were going to tell us your names,” he comments. 

Will’s eye twitches. He has an oddly cornered, canine look. He gestures to the still- open door. “Changed your mind, _detective_?” he asks.

“‘Course not.” 

John looks nervously back and forth between them. He’d tried to talk Sherlock out of this, tried to get _anything_ out of him about his motivations for inviting himself over to the home of two complete strangers in the lobby of the ballet, and had eventually given up. If it was for a case, he wouldn’t get a word out of Sherlock until after the whole thing was over. 

Will leads them to a dining room; large and well-appointed, but not opulent, and the man that Sherlock had fixated on at the ballet is waiting there.   
“I’m pleased you could make it, Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson,” Hannibal says, and then straightens up, looking up and down John’s body critically. 

“Before we eat,” he says, “I believe it would be in everyone’s best interests if there were no firearms around the table.” 

John’s blood runs cold, and he has half a mind to reach for his gun with the intent of using it, when Hannibal turns to Will instead and holds out his hand. 

Will scowls at him, and awkwardly pulls a pistol out of a thigh-holster. Hannibal takes it, pops out the clip, and sets both down on the table. 

“Dr. Watson?” Hannibal is turned towards him, somehow both relaxed and coiled to strike at the same time. John sucks his teeth a little, staring at Will’s gun on the table. It’s possible— more than possible, likely— that the little performance with Will’s gun was planned, intended to throw them off. John glances up at Sherlock, who seems to be evaluating the exact same possibility. 

Finally Sherlock nods, looking more confident than John feels. “Give it to him, John,” he says in a low voice, and John’s gun joins Will’s on the table. 

“A fitting centrepiece,” Hannibal says lightly, and it turns out he actually isn’t fucking joking, as he leans the two pistols up against each other in the middle of the table, then places the clips in a chest of drawers in the corner of the room. 

Will is actually smiling, a little ruefully, at the ridiculous sight of two guns as decoration on a dinner table, so John tries to breathe out and relax. 

“Police?” John asks, and Will actually seems surprised by the question. Like John should have known him already. 

“Former FBI,” he says, and John nods. “I was an army doctor,” he offers. 

Will frowns, then a smile starts creeping onto his face and he glances back and forth between John and Sherlock. John wants to mutter _yeah, yeah, you’ve got me. Whatever’s going on here, he’s the only one who knows a damn thing about it. No need to rub it in._

Will doesn’t rub it in; instead he gestures to the table, noticeably looser, and says, “please, sit down.” 

Hannibal brings out small bowls of what he introduces as leek and Stilton soup, holding them on his arms like he’s some sort of fancy waiter. John is surprised to note that, once they’re all settled, Sherlock eats the entire bowl, and listens attentively to Hannibal’s explanation of the cultivation of Stilton cheese, which John could not care less about. 

It’s awkward and stilted and John wishes he were anywhere else until the moment that the conversation turns enough for Sherlock to off-handedly say something about incompetent crime scene techs, and suddenly he and Will are talking a mile a minute about how impossible it is to work with anyone who’ll leave a decent amount of evidence at a crime scene. 

John must look as gobsmacked as he feels, because Hannibal leans across the table and says, “Will used to work as a profiler for the FBI. Very similar work to what your partner does, though perhaps they would have difficulty understanding each others’ methods in an intuitive way.” 

The main course is artichokes and fucking _fried brains_ on a bed of orzo, which John just stares at until Will says “Go on,” gently. “It’s good, I promise.” John has apparently wandered into some strange alternate universe where people who might want to kill him actually have input on his food choices, because he spears a piece and brings it to his lips and Will is right, it _is_ good, savour and fatty and filling, and he tilts his head a little to watch Sherlock, who is staring at the brain like it might crawl off the plate. 

“It’s perfectly safe, Mr. Holmes,” says Hannibal, calm and welcoming but with an undercurrent of thunder. “Unless you are investigating the disappearance of a rash Creutzfeldt–Jakob’s patients?” 

Sherlock bites into the brain, and John just blinks. 

Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease; a fatal degenerative brain disease. A disease which, famously, was present in the brain tissue consumed by tribes practicing funerary cannibalism, leading to the disease known in the literature as kuru, the shaking sickness. 

_This_ brain, Hannibal has just assured Sherlock, is perfectly safe to eat. 

John’s fork clatters down on his plate, but before his brain has caught up to his body, Sherlock’s hand is stroking down his arm, soothing. 

“My apologies,” Sherlock says, and he sounds light and unconcerned. “John here is a worrier.” 

Hannibal smiles. “I understand completely,” he says. “Will also has a tendency to get wrapped up in his own mind.” 

John glances up at Will across the table, and Will just grins at him. 

John picks up his fork, and takes another bite. 

***

Will watches the detective and his overprotective doctor pull out of the driveway.   
“Now what?”

Hannibal comes up behind him, twining his arms around Will’s waist. “Now I need to load the dishwasher,” he says, “And after that, I would like to have a drink, and then ravage you.”

“Jesus.” Will turns around, trying not to be charmed despite himself, and mostly succeeding. “Hannibal. What are we going to do about the _detectives_ that you just fed dinner, regaled with stories of murder and mayhem, and then _let go._” 

“Same thing they’re going to do about us,” Hannibal says, and looks at Will expectantly. 

Will sighs. He had actually rather liked talking to Sherlock Holmes, and it’s no great hardship to go poking through the echoes of his mind that Will feels ricocheting around the dining room. 

“He was… off the clock,” says Will, “for want of a better word. He gets, well— bored.” He sighs, leans back against Hannibal. Sherlock was like running up against a mirror image of himself. “He just wanted to see what would happen.”

Hannibal’s lips trace over Will’s jaw, up his cheek, over his ear. “Understandable.” 

“Still not exactly _smart,_ Hannibal.”

“But they’re not going to do anything,” Will says, “You’re right. But we should leave soon. To be honest, I was getting a bit sick of the English countryside anyway.”

“Italy, perhaps,” Hannibal muses. 

“Mmm,” says Will. “Twist my arm. Italy.”


	31. The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Wildcard. Well, I could never entirely predict you.

[Happy birthday, _mano meilė_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21261026). 


End file.
